Quotes from Georges Simenon

The inspector knew the mentality of malefactors, criminals and crooks. He knew that you always find some kind of passion at the root of it.

Ce n'est pas possible d'éplucher des pommes de terre et de gratter des carottes en combinaison.

Why, despite the blinding brightness, did everything look gray? It was as if the painfully sharp lights were helpless to dispel all the darkness the people had brought in from the night outside.

Human tragedies are always simple when we reconsider them in retrospect.

She came forward, the outlines of her figure blurred in the half-light. She came forward like a film star, or rather like the ideal woman in an adolescent's dream.

He had read endless books, he had digested them, pondered over them. Day by day, year after year, he had turned over all the problems of human beings. Yet there were all sorts of simple things he didn't know how to do: he couldn't even walk into an inn and sit down at a table.

È terribile pensare che siamo tutti uomini, tutti destinati, chi più chi meno, a portare il nostro fardello sotto un cielo sconosciuto, e che non vogliamo fare il minimo sforzo per capirci a vicenda.

He distrusted ideas, as they were always too rigid to reflect reality, which, as he knew from experience, was very fluid.

The change in the girl's face was more subtle, almost invisible; it was not joy, there was no sparkle, but something like a serene contentment. It was as though she had ripened, as though there were a growing plenitude in her, never there before.

We're a bit like criminal lawyers. We're the public face of things, but it's the civil lawyers who do the serious work, in the shadows.

C'era un'atmosfera da domenica sera, quando ci si sente fiacchi senza aver fatto nulla, invasi da un molle torpore, e i minuti scorrono più lenti che gli altri giorni.

He was a big, bony man. Iron muscles shaped his jacket sleeves and quickly wore through new trousers. He had a way of imposing himself just by standing there.

If I try to define my state as accurately as possible, I'd say that I possessed a warped lucidity. Reality existed around me, and I was in contact with it. I was aware of my actions.

The weather was so contrary and fierce that the rain wasn't mere rain or the wind freezing wind - this was a conspiracy of the elements.

Maigret had often tried to get other people, including men of experience, to admit that those who fall, especially those who have a morbid determination to descend ever lower, are almost always idealists.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.

And Boucard desisted, probably because like everyone else he was deeply impressed by this man who had laid all ghosts, who had lost all shadows, and who stared you in the eyes with cold serenity.

One of them, for example, which will probably haunt me more than any other is the problem of communication.