Muriel Barbery

Thinking back on it, this evening, with my heart and my stomach all like jelly, I have finally concluded, maybe that’s what life is about: there’s a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It’s as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, an always within never. Yes, that’s it, an always within never. Don’t worry Renée, I won’t commit suicide and I won’t burn a thing. Because from now on, for you, I’ll be searching for those moments of always within never. Beauty, in this world.

— Muriel Barbery

This is eminently true of many happy moments in life. Freed from the demands of decision and intention, adrift on some inner sea, we observe our various movements as if they belonged to someone else, and yet we admire their involuntary excellence.

— Muriel Barbery

This pause in time, within time ... When did I first experience the exquisite sense of surrender that is only possible with another person? The peace of mind one experiences on one's own, one's certainty of self in the serenity of solitude, are nothing in comparison to the release and openness and fluency one shares with another, in close companionship ...

— Muriel Barbery

To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one in our society to a dark and disillusioned life...to beauty all is forgiven.

— Muriel Barbery

To the rich, therefore, falls the burden of Beauty. And if they cannot assume it, then they deserve to die.

— Muriel Barbery

To write a profound thought, I have to put myself onto a very special stratum, otherwise the ideas and words just don't come. I have to forget myself and at the same time be super concentrated. But it's not a question of the will, it is a mechanism I can set in motion or not, like scratching my nose or doing a backward roll.

— Muriel Barbery

... we absolutely mustn't forget it. We mustn't forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don't want to think about (so it is to retirement homes that they entrust the care of accompanying their parents to the threshold, with no fuss or bother). And where's the joy in these final hours they ought to be making the most of? They're spent in boredom and bitterness, endlessly revisiting memories. We mustn't forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you're twenty and the next day you're eighty.

— Muriel Barbery

We can be friends. We can be anything we want to be.

— Muriel Barbery

...we have to surpass ourselves every day, make every day undying. Climb our own personal Everest and do it in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity. That's what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.

— Muriel Barbery

We think we can make honey without sharing in the fate of bees, but we are in truth nothing but poor bees, destined to accomplish our task and then die.

— Muriel Barbery