Muriel Barbery

And on the way home I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.

— Muriel Barbery

Any game where the goal is to build territory has to be beautiful. There may be phases of combat, but they are only means to an end, to allow your territory to survive. One of the most extraordinary aspects of the game of go is that it has been proven that in order to win, you must live, but you must also allow the other player to live. Players who are too greedy will lose: it is a subtle game of equilibrium, where you have to get ahead without crushing the other player. In the end, life and death are only the consequences of how well or how poorly you have made your construction. This is what one of Yamaguchi's characters says: you live, you die, these are consequences. It's a proverb for playing go, and for life.

— Muriel Barbery

Because beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things at the moment, when you can see both their movement and their death.

— Muriel Barbery

Because from now on, for you, I'll be searching for those moments of always within never/Beauty, in this world.

— Muriel Barbery

But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed.

— Muriel Barbery

Clara looked at Maria and tried to understand what she must do so that Maria would be able to see her. But the little French girl cast all around her the bronze of infinite solitude.

— Muriel Barbery

Elsewhere, the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people live and die, some nations disintegrate, while others are born, soon to be swallowed up in turn - and in all this sound and fury, amidst eruptions and undertows, while the world goes its merry way, bursts into flames, tears itself apart and is reborn: human life continues to throb. So, let us drink a cup of tea.

— Muriel Barbery

Entrusting one's life is not the same as opening up one's soul.

— Muriel Barbery

For a few seconds Maria did not move, or even breathe, apparently. Then she gave a sorrowful gulp and, like all little girls, even those who speak to fantastical wild boars and mercurial horses, she collapsed in desperate sobs, of the kind that come so easily to a twelve-year-old, and so hard to a person of forty.

— Muriel Barbery

For the first time in my life I understood the meaning of the word 'never'. And it's really awful. You say the word a hundred times a day, but you don't really know what you're saying until you're faced with a real 'never again'.

— Muriel Barbery