Quotes from Jean-Christophe Valtat

Clusters of distant lights was the view of Mankind that he liked the best. The lights had the archaic charm of little fires on a plain, and the frailty about them, if it did not excuse anything, at least explained a lot of Man's stubborn ruthlessness. Mankind had not started the mess that was life, after all. And on the whole, it had been an interesting species to be a part of, the girls especially, as long as you remembered to watch your back.

But if neither sadness or rage could unite us, I didn't know what could - the more I wanted to identify with her, the more I identified with myself; and the more I tried to understand her, the less, necessarily, I succeeded: the failure of an intelligent mind to grasp feeblemindedness was dark and deep, no less than the failure of a feeble mind to grasp intelligence, because intelligence got its shape by not understanding the thing it could never be.

Paris was no more Babylon than it was New Jerusalem. All cities worthy of that name were both: they were one because they were the other...

It was the French of the Normans that, grafting itself onto the barbaric Saxon tongue, gave it its most magnificent blossoming. And, in these new countries, where both English and French are intertwined again, it is as if English were bathing itself in the fountain of its own youth, and as if French were remembering the buried treasures it had thought forgotten.

This isn't the time for bravado, Mr. Orsini,' he said. Brentford couldn't help himself. 'No, it isn't,' he said. 'Perhaps you could come back later?

He considered each and every second as if he'd never encountered one before, as if the time it kept was a permanent surprise.

even if the previous millisecond is closer to us than the birth of the universe, it is equally out of reach.

Could it be, God forbid, that nationality is only a superficial, insignificant layer of the onion that is your being? What would you think of the man who would say of himself 'I am an overcoat' just because he happened to be wearing one?

In English sometimes they call a mentally disabled person a retard, and there is a kind of accidental poetry in naming a human being with this quality of latency or absence, like a clock left behind in an empty room, a page someone forgot to rip out of a calendar, the walking embodiment of jet lag.

She was the living effigy of everything we will never be and, in every sense of the word, she was the retard that I was and that I wasn't, she was my vanishing, wasted talent, and I was the price society paid so that I could become what she couldn't. And this was exactly what I was trying to love; what this little girl, this girl of wire, made it known she could never be; everthing that had been, or that would be no matter who we were, borne away from each of us.

I heard there was a riot.' 'There was a demonstration, which I think is different. It was peaceful until it was interrupted.' Mason seemed to be thinking hard about it. 'What sort of demonstration?' 'Hmm... A new kind. It looked poetical at first but then became rather poletical.

A body is not unlike a pet -- stupid and dirty as it is, one becomes attached to it.

The news took a moment to sink in, probably because there was no bottom for it to alight upon.

Brentford gave the polite smile of a man who talks daily with a living mechanical head about a city in the Arctic Circle governed by hermaphrodite Siamese twins born from a dead woman, and refrained from further comments about the probable and improbable.

Vassily cleared his throat, probably impatient with Gabriel's bookshelf manners. 'You'll have to excuse me,' Gabriel said, putting back the booklet, 'I have a severe addiction to ink.' 'Don't we all?' Vassily nodded. 'Thank God we have other addictions to assuage it a little.

I have heard about your gifts myself, Miss Roth,' read the subtitle under Brentford's awkward mumble.

When in doubt, do what they do in books, was one of Gabriel's secret mottos and - that rarest of things - a principle that he actually lived by.

They were working hard at their own myth.

Books knew more than you did, as a rule.