Julien Gracq > Quotes

“It was a fossilized path: the will which had cut this gash out of these solitary places so that the blood and sap would flow there was long since dead - and dead too were the circumstances which had guided this will. A whitish and indurated scar remained, gradually gnawed away by the earth like a flesh that heals itself, yet its direction was still vaguely cut into the horizon; a language and crepuscular sign rather than a way forward - a worn-out lifeline which still vegetated through the fallow land as it does on the palm of a hand. It was so old that, since it had been constructed, the very configuration of the land must have changed imperceptibly.”
― Julien Gracq

“Often, beyond the next turning, footfalls of a herd galloping across stone were heard, or further in the distance, with reassuring grunts, a wild boar could be seen, trotting with steady stride along the edge of the road with her sow and a whole procession of young in tow. And then one's heart beat faster upon advancing a little into the subtle light: one might have said that the path had suddenly become wild, thick with grass, its dark paving-slabs engulfed by nettles, blackthorn and sloe, so that it mingled up time past rather than crossing country-side, and perhaps it was going to issue forth, in the chiaroscuro of thicket smelling of moistened down and fresh grass, into one of those glades where animals spoke to men.”
― Julien Gracq

“Blood had long since ceased to beat from one end to the other, but one could sense, from passages marked with fresher traces of wheels and hooves, that once the meaning and even the very idea of a long journey was lost, sleep had not descended over it in one fell swoop: it had continued to steal a march here and there, in a discontinuous way, and over short distances, like a laborer who feels his cart jolt on a section of Roman road that crosses his field...”
― Julien Gracq

“No, what numbed these fields, peopled with bad dreams was not the oppressive grip of a plague but rather an ailing retreat, a sort of sad widowhood. Man had started to subdue these vacant expanses, then had grown weary of eating into it, and now even the desire to preserve what had been claimed had perished. He had established everywhere an ebb, a sorrowful withdrawal. His cuttings into the forest, which were seen at long intervals, had lost their hard edges, their distinct notches: now a thick brushwood had driven its sabbath into the broad daylight of the glades, hiding the naked trunks as high as their lowest branches.”
― Julien Gracq

“On its own, having escaped my grasp, the spool I had loosed was unwinding.”
― Julien Gracq, A Balcony in the Forest

“A history of literature, unlike history as such, ought to list only victories, for its defeats are no victory for anyone.”
― Julien Gracq

“De nouveau il entendit la porte s'ouvrir, et, calme, du fond de la chambre, il vit venir à lui sa dernière heure.”
― Julien Gracq, A Dark Stranger

“Tout ce qu’on introduit dans un roman devient signe.”
― Julien Gracq

“...a redoubtable alchemy was at work behind impenetrable veils as the forest prepared its nocturnal mysteries.”
― Julien Gracq

“And what can still delight an inert stone except to become, once more, the bed of a raging torrent?”
― Julien Gracq, The Opposing Shore

“Solitude and boredom. It's what happens to something that's felt itself gathered together too long, too...exclusively. The vacuum that occurs at its frontiers--a kind of numbness which is generated on its torpid surface as if it had lost the sense of touch--lost contact.”
― Julien Gracq, The Opposing Shore

“but the force of traditions, as in all crumbling empires, grows proportionately with the explicit revelation, in the machinery of government and commerce alike, of the preponderant action of all principles of inertia...”
― Julien Gracq, The Opposing Shore

“There are cities that are damned for some people by the mere fact that they seem created to close off the distances that are the only reason for living.”
― Julien Gracq, The Opposing Shore

“La verité est triste, comme vous le savez. Elle déçoit parce qu'elle restreint. Elle tient dans un poing fermé, puis dans le geste d'une main qui se délace et rejette. Elle est pauvre, elle démeuble et démunit.”
― Julien Gracq, A Dark Stranger

“J'ai lu quelque part que la mort était une société secrète...Ce qui n'est qu'une fin, un pis-aller, et c'est peu dire, pour la plupart des êtres, ne peut-il devenir pour d'autres une vocation?
- Quelquefois, et jamais autant que ce soir, je me le suis demandé. Et - comme toutes les vocations - contagieuse.”
― Julien Gracq, A Dark Stranger

“Mais ce que je ne savais pas, c'est qu'il n'est pas bon de laisser la mort se promener trop longtemps à visage découvert sur la terre. Je ne savais pas... Elle émeut, elle éveille la mort encore endormie au fond des autres, comme un enfant dans le ventre d'une femme. Et comme quand une femme rencontre une femme grosse - même si elle détourne la tête, tout au fond d'eux-mêmes, si l'on descendait, on les sentirait complices... Oui, c'est leur mort tout d'un coup qui bouge en eux.”
― Julien Gracq, A Dark Stranger

“There’s nothing that people rebel more against, I told Jacques, than being forced to acknowledge the secret and immediate power their fellow human beings have over them. There’s maybe nothing more common, routine. A savage power, as indifferent as a thunderbolt, where intellect, merit, beauty, language are nothing but animal electricity, a polarity that suddenly develops. Falling under the spell. Forever. We never talk about it—it’s taboo.”
― Julien Gracq, A Dark Stranger

“This stretch through the fogbound forest gradually lulled Grange into his favorite daydream; in it he saw an image of his life: all that he had he carried with him; twenty feet away, the world grew dark, perspectives blurred, and there was nothing near him but this close halo of warm consciousness, this nest perched high above the vague earth.”
― Julien Gracq, A Balcony in the Forest

“Ce qui commence par : "Je me hâtais de déplaire exprès, par crainte de déplaire naturellement" (Mauriac) continue par : "Je me hâtais d'échouer exprès,par crainte d'échouer naturellement", et pourrait se terminer un jour par : "Je me hâtais de mourir exprès,par crainte de mourir naturellement" (une phrase d'excellent comique).”
― Julien Gracq, A Dark Stranger

“I felt in complicity with the tendency of this country to absolute desolation.”
― Julien Gracq, The Opposing Shore

“the very air I breathed in these empty, chilly halls ...seemed vaguely impregnated with a more volatile essence, the kind of which it is expressively said that they exist in the state of scents, traces which escape attention once they have roused it, and in whose subtle distillation time--a time which instead of devouring itself seemed here to decant and thicken itself like the lees of old wine, with that almost spiritual succulence by which certain noble vintages make the years themselves explode on the tongue--counted for almost everything.”
― Julien Gracq, The Opposing Shore

“Es gibt einen warmherzigen und sanften Spott, der auf engster Vertrautheit beruht, einer, die man nicht einzugestehen hat - einen Spott, der aus nichts anderem besteht als dem Bedürfnis, ein Übermaß an Sympathie aufzulösen.”
― Julien Gracq

“She felt herself to be at one of those nodes of the planet's human vibrations where absolute calm, albeit engendered by the juggling interference of contrary motions, is all the more soothing in its perilous instability.”
― Julien Gracq, Château d'Argol

“[Original text in French] Giovanni n'avait pas menti. Sagra était une merveille baroque, une collision improbable et inquiétante de la nature et de l'art.

[My translation to English] Giovanni hadn't lied. Sagra was a Baroque wonder, an unlikely and disturbing collision between Nature and Arts.

[My translation to Spanish] Giovanni no había mentido. Sagra era una maravilla barroca, una colisión improbable e inquitante de la naturaleza con el arte.”
― Julien Gracq, The Opposing Shore

“... Size bir devlet sırrı vereceğim. İcracılara verilmesi pek doğru olmayan bir sır ... " diye sürdürdü. "Bir zaaf sırrı.
Kötü bir duruma yol açan beklenmedik bir olay baş gösterdiğinde, her şeyin kendisiyle başlamış olduğu kişi önce yerinde tutulur
her zaman.”
― Julien Gracq, The Opposing Shore

“Es una suerte para un escritor no haber estado de moda jamás, sino haber permanecido en una zona de retiro y sombra a la que solo acudían los que tenían verdaderas ganas de conocerle.”
― Julien Gracq, Nœuds de vie

“Nerede kaldı diplomasinin 'öngörmek için bilmek,
gereğini yapmak için de öngörmek' kuralı?
Hareketsizliğin hafiflikten bir farkı var mı?”
― Julien Gracq, The Opposing Shore

“He heard the dog bay two or three times, then the cry of the screech owl at the nearby edge of the forest, then nothing more: the earth around him was as dead as a plain of snow. Life fell back to this sweetish silence, the peace of a field of asphodels, only the faint rustle of blood within the ear, like the sound of the unattainable sea in a shell.”
― Julien Gracq, A Balcony in the Forest

“Tant de mains pour transformer ce monde, et si peu de regards pour le contempler.”
― Julien Gracq, Lettrines

“Sitting at loose ends beside the little wicker table in his bright, sunny room, looking out over the poplars of the Vienne, he fell back into one of his favourite daydreams about the Roof. Nothing in this war was like any of the others; it was a soft degeneration, a dying twilight of peace indefinitely prolonged—so prolonged that one could dream in spite of oneself, after this strange half-season, this plunge into sleepless nights, each new day attaching itself to the old without any break in continuity.”
― Julien Gracq, A Balcony in the Forest