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Start by following Guy de Maupassant.
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“Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.”
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“Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.”
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“There is only one good thing in life, and that is love.”
― The Complete Short Stories of de Maupassant
― The Complete Short Stories of de Maupassant
“A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.”
― Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques
― Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques
“Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms”
― Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques
― Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques
“I love the night passionately. I love it as I love my country, or my mistress, with an instinctive, deep, and unshakeable love. I love it with all my senses: I love to see it, I love to breathe it in, I love to open my ears to its silence, I love my whole body to be caressed by its blackness. Skylarks sing in the sunshine, the blue sky, the warm air, in the fresh morning light. The owl flies by night, a dark shadow passing through the darkness; he hoots his sinister, quivering hoot, as though he delights in the intoxicating black immensity of space. ”
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“It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living.”
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“...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.”
― Complete Works
― Complete Works
“I told myself: 'I am surrounded by unknown things.' I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me – afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness?”
― Complete Works
― Complete Works
“The kiss itself is immortal. It travels from lip to lip, century to century, from age to age. Men and women garner these kisses, offer them to others and then die in turn.”
― The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One
― The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One
“breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do is dying. to live, in fact, is to die.”
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“Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.”
― Complete Works
― Complete Works
“The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death.”
― The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One
― The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One
“A human being - what is a human being? Everything and nothing. Through the power of thought it can mirror everything it experiences. Through memory and knowledge it becomes a microcosm, carrying the world within itself. A mirror of things, a mirror of facts. Each human being becomes a little universe within the universe!”
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“Life is a slope. As long as you're going up you're always looking towards the top and you feel happy, but when you reach it, suddenly you can see the road going downhill and death at the end of it all. It's slow going up and quick going down.”
― Bel-Ami
― Bel-Ami
“If I could, I would stop the passage of time. But hour follows on hour, minute on minute, each second robbing me of a morsel of myself for the nothing of tomorrow. I shall never experience this moment again.”
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“We breathe, sleep, drink, eat, work and then die! The end of life is death. What do you long for? Love? A few kisses and you will be powerless. Money? What for? To gratify your desires. Glory? What coems after it all? Death! Death alone is certain.”
― Bel-Ami
― Bel-Ami
“It is better to be unhappy in love than unhappy in marriage, but some people manage to be both.”
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“Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It's the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all.”
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“She realized for the first time that two people can never reach each others deepest feelings and instincts, that they spend their lives side by side, linked it may be, but not mingled, and that each one's inmost being must go through life eternally alone.”
― A Woman's Life and Other Stories
― A Woman's Life and Other Stories
“It is love that is sacred," she said." Listen, child, to an old woman who has seen three generations, and who has had a long experience of men and women. Marriage and love have nothing in common. We marry to found a family, and we form families in order to constitute society. Society cannot dispense with marriage. If society is a chain, each family is a link in that chain. In order to weld those links, we always seek metals of the same order. When we marry, we must bring together suitable conditions; we must combine fortunes, unite similiar races and aim at the common interest, which is riches and children. We marry only once, my child, because the world requires us to do so, but we love twenty times in one lifetime because nature has made us like this. Marriage, you see, is law and love is an instinct which impels us, sometimes along a straight, and sometimes along a devious path. The world has made laws to combat our instincts- it was necessary to make them; but our instincts are always stronger, and we ought not to resist them too much, because they come from God; while laws come from men. If we did not perfume life with love, as much love as possible,darling, as we put sugar into drugs for children, nobody would care to take it just as it is.”
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“You've never lived until you've almost died. For those who have fought for it, life has a flavor the protected shall never know.”
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“A lawful kiss is never worth as much as a stolen one.”
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“It is the encounters with people that make life worth living.”
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“I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing”
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“There are two races on earth. Those who need others, who are distracted, occupied and refreshed by others, who are worried, exhausted and unnerved by solitude as by the ascension of a terrible glacier or the crossing of a desert; and those, on the other hand, who are wearied, bored, embarrassed, utterly fatigued by others, while isolation calms them, and the detachment and imaginative activity of their minds bathes them in peace.”
― 88 Short Stories
― 88 Short Stories
“Les paroles d'amour, qui sont toujours les mêmes, prennent le goût des lèvres dont elles sortent.”
― Bel-Ami
― Bel-Ami
