Quotes from Romain Gary

The dominant strain of the twentieth century, whether emanating from Marx or Freud, has been self-awareness; we have lost the art of forgetting ourselves. Which means we have little chance of being happy, since so much of happiness consists of inner peace; of playing ostrich, in fact. To say nothing of the fact that all this psychological self-consciousness is rather vulgar...

You have a very special personal relationship with God, Mathieu. You're the kind of atheist who can't forgive God for NOT existing, and who gives the impression that in your eyes the only scientific discovery truly worthy of man's genious would be the discovery of God.

The ability to laugh is what differentiates man from the beasts, but evidently one cannot always get oneself in a laughing mood.

Mathieu didn't know at all what to do about May. He felt a kind of nausea, probably induced by the regular movement of the ball. She was having religious fits again. Jesus Christ, she thought, how many thousands of years will it take people to get over their folklore?

At the moment we have unemployment, of course, and a shortage of orders, and tight credit, but those are only necessary phases of readjustment. Sometimes I wonder whether the Roman patricians didn't secretly long for the barbarians... And too, there are always those who mistake their own dilapidated condition for the decadence of a civilization.

I battled my feelings of inferiority bravely, picking out a guest and imagining him floating in the air at the end of a line I held in my hand, with his stiff-legged trousers, his checked vest, and his yellow tie, propelled this way or that with a flick of my hand. It was the first time I had wielded my imagination as a weapon of defense, and nothing ever turned out to be more beneficial to me in this life.

Tu as quelqu'un, quelque part ? A qui il faut écrire où on t'a enterré ? – C'est pas la peine de gaspiller un timbre. »

His thoughts too were weary, and he felt a little sad to be so very old; it meant he had not much time left and would have to content himself with what he knew already.

But she could feel that behind his words there was something nice and rather odd — kind people are often odd, she had explained to Saint-Denis, and she had added, rather mysteriously: it can't be otherwise.

il se demandait parfois jusqu'où on pouvait aller nulle part.

Quelque chose a été enfermé en moi, par erreur, dans la peau d'un homme.

Boldel de saclé nom de Dieu ! dit alors en bâillant le bébé sur le plancher. Boldel de saclé nom de Dieu, quelle famille ! Vous avez pas un journal ou quelque chose ? On s'emmelde ici !

May, if man had access to God he would try to tap Him for power . . . what a source of energy! Who can deny that since the dawn of history, mankind's fascination with gods, and God has been above all a fascination with power?

No one has ever managed to resolve the contradiction there is in wanting to defend something human in the company of men.

People often told him that Lan was very beautiful, but Pei had no opinion about that. He had never really noticed other women, and to say that a woman was or was not beautiful meant looking at her with an experienced eye.

Starr noticed that some of her prettiness was gone now, and that left her beautiful. The inner wear and tear was showing through. Shining through.

And you can't judge men by what they when they take off their pants. For their really filthy tricks they dress up--they even put on uniforms, flags and decorations.

The nurses were smiling, the doctors came and smiled, the other patients watched them and listened to their conversation and giggled cheerfully. They all knew who General Pei was, and they were eager to show him their unshakable faith in the life ahead of them, even though almost all in this ward were individually dying. But collectively they had tremendous prospects, and they were lying there on their backs, too weak to move, beaming.

Maman ! hurle Carmen, en voyant que je partais et que j'avais déjà un pied dehors. Ne t'en va donc pas comme ça ! Laisse-nous quelque chose, en attendant que Lucien trouve du travail ! » « Tout ce que j'peux vous laisser, c'est ça ! » que j'leurs dis , en levant une jambe et en lâchant un pet.

There must be a trick behind it, a dishonest trick, something crooked, something political, something they can understand. They're so used to sniffing at their own behinds that when someone wants to get a breath of fresh air, to turn at last to something different and more important, and threatened, something that's got to be saved at all costs, it's quite beyond them.

I guess I'm only talking about my childhood. Things that become part of you when you're a child and then you grow up and somehow they don't—and that's how you never get to be a mature person, an adult, with those naïve beliefs in you that never grew up . . .

Humor is a passive form of terrorism, of resistance, and of pseudo-aggression that has less to do with changing the world than with mental hygiene. It is self-therapy...

The exploitation of foreign laborers sometimes takes interesting forms for the exploited. And once you are accustomed to being exploited, you begin to participate in the process, you learn to exploit the exploitation.

It's strange, he thought, how beautiful human hands can be in spite of what they do.