Bokelskere.no

Without France, the world would be alone.
- Victor Hugo

She dressed badly.
- Francoise Giroud, the writer, upon learning of the death of Simone de Beauvoir.

As a child he had known instinctively that it was always better to tell a partial truth with a willing aspect than to tell a perfect truth in a defensive way.

You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer "yes" without having asked any clear question.
- Albert Camus, The Fall

At the time of the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998, CBS News aired a lighthearted report on the French and their attitude toward infidelity.

D'ORMESSON: The whole French culture has love at its center, and perhaps cheating.
CBS REPORTER: Cheating is that important?
D'ORMESSON: Ah, cheating, cheating - let us say "looking elsewhere."............
Each time you cheat, you marry the new woman in America. And we keep the same wife and we have several mistresses. Roughly speaking, that's the position between your culture and ours...........
When you are well brought up, you try to cheat without too much harm, perhaps......... We cheat in so many, many, many hundred years that now you know how to manage. Don't try. It's very difficult, you know?
CBS REPORTER: You have to be French?
D'ORMESSON: You have to be French.
CBS REPORTER: Are you serious?
D'ORMESSON: Yes.

"You can say everything in one look, and yet you can always deny the look, for it cannot be quoted word for word."
(Stendhal)

The boy helps with cleaning up after the meeting of the Craftmen's Association, which went smoothly. Only two who vomited, only one who passed out, and one other who went home with a broken nose; important meetings, said the chairman to Helga, they brings us together, it's the solidarity that counts, otherwise the nobs march over us and trample us into the shit.

The struggle for life and dreams don't go together, poetry and salt fich are irreconciable, and no-one eats his own dreams.

He tried to give his wife pleasure in little ways, because he had come to realize, after nearly two decades together, how often he disappointed her in big things. It was never intentional. They simply had very different notions of what ought to take up most space in life.

Hell is to be dead and to realize that you did not care for life while you had the chance to do so.

The hours are numerous and the clock seldom measures the time that passes inside us, the real lifetime, and because of this many days can fit into a few hours, and vica versa, and numbers of years can be an imprecise measure of a man's lifetime, he who dies at forty has perhaps actually lived much longer than he who dies at ninety.

We might not need words to survive; on the other hand, we do need words to live.