Quotes from Michel Houellebecq

You have to take an interest in something in life, I told myself. I wondered what could interest me, now that I was finished with love. I could take a course in wine tasting, maybe, or start collecting model aeroplanes.

Quand on aime la vie, on ne lit pas.

It's submission," Rediger murmured. "The shocking and simple idea, which had never been so forcefully expressed, that the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission.

În via?? se poate întâmpla orice, ÅŸi mai ales nimic.

It was amazing, even, to think that the only thing left to people in their despair was reading.

In my life, I had known suffering, oppression, anxiety; I had never known boredom. I could see no objection to the endless, imbecile repetition of sameness.

My life, my life, my very old one My first badly healed desire, My first crippled love, You had to return. It was necessary to know What is best in our lives, When two bodies play at happiness, Unite, reborn without end. Entered into complete dependency, I know the trembling of being, The hesitation to disappear, Sunlight upon the forest's edge And love, where all is easy, Where all is given in the instant; There exists in the midst of time The possibility of an island.

Some people live to be seventy, sometimes eighty years old believing there is always something new just around the corner, as they say; in the end they practically have to be killed or at least reduced to a state of serious incapacity to get them to see reason.

Si la sincérité, en elle-même, n'est rien, elle est la condition de tout.

O kadar az yaÅŸad?m ki sanki hiç ölmeyecekmiÅŸim gibi düÅŸünme eÄŸilimindeyim; insan hayat?n?n bu kadarc?k bir ÅŸeye indirgenmesi gerçek olamazm?? gibi geliyor bana; elinizde olmadan, er ya da geç bir ÅŸey olacak diye hayal ediyorsunuz. Büyük hata. Bir hayat pekâlâ da boÅŸ ve k?sa olabilir. Günler ne bir iz ne bir an? b?rakmadan sefil bir ÅŸekilde ak?p gider; ve sonra bir anda duruverir.

They were really willing to pay to avoid any trouble. No doubt they had overestimated the ability of academics to make a nuisance of themselves. It had been years since an academic title gained you access to major media.... Even if all the university professors in France had risen up in protest, almost nobody would have noticed, but apparently they hadn't found that out in Saudi Arabia. They still believed, deep down, in the power of the intellectual elite. It was almost touching.

All I knew was that once again I found myself alone, with even less desire to live and nothing to look forward to but aggravations.

The feeling of closeness when we talked on the phone was too violent, and the void that came afterward too cruel.

from the bureaucratic point of view, a good citizen is a dead citizen.

As I got older, I also found myself agreeing more with Nietzsche, as is no doubt inevitable once your plumbing starts to fail.

it's perfectly possible to live without expecting anything of life; in fact, it's the most common way.

There is no Israel for me.

Aggression often masks a desire to seduce – I'd read that in Boris Cyrulnik, and Boris Cyrulnik isn't fucking around.

Should I just die? The decision struck me as premature.

Y todas las teorías de la libertad, desde Gide a Sartre, no son sino inmoralidades concebidas por solteros irresponsables.

You really can't do anything about people's lives, I said to myself, neither friendship nor compassion nor the intelligence of the situations is of any use: people manufacture the mechanism of their own misfortune, they wind it right up and the mechanism goes on turning

The whole point of bureaucracy is to reduce the possibilities of your life to the greatest possible degree when it doesn't simply succeed in destroying them; from the bureaucratic point of view, a good citizen is a dead citizen.

There is no endless silence of infinite space, for in reality there is no space, no silence and no void.

The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know, unless you happen to be an especially gifted student, in which case it prepares you for a career teaching the academic study of literature—it is, in other words, a rather farcical system that exists solely to replicate itself and yet manages to fail more than 95 percent of the time.