Peter Brooks > Quotes

“Woman, especially her sexuality, provides the object of endless commentary , description, supposition. But the result of all the telling only deepens the enigma and makes woman's erotic force something that male storytelling can never quite explain or contain.”
― Peter Brooks

“Wisdom not only comes with suffering: when it comes, it is radically unusable. (Brooks' comment on the Oedipus tragedy)”
― Peter Brooks, Enigmas of Identity

“Cognitive psychologists have confirmed what we already knew: that readers of complex novels show a greater capacity for understanding the complexities of human interaction.8”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“(...) "anlatı" sözcüğünün Hint-Avrupa kökeni "bilmekten" gelir ve bu nedenle anlatı aslen bize kökenlerimizi, dünyanın ve bizim nereden geldiğimizi anlatan "bilgelik edebiyatı" olarak görülebilir.”
― Peter Brooks, Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative

“everything,” Balzac claims, “is a mosaic.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“To possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others: this I think captures our love of and our need for novels, for fictional accounts of the world that let us experience it beyond the limits of our own pair of eyes, to imagine it, provisionally, as it is seen and felt by someone else, however different that person may be.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Dünyada iyi bir hikayeden daha güçlü bir şey yoktur. Hiçbir şey onu durduramaz. Hiçbir düşman onu yenemez.
Taht Oyunları filminden”
― Peter Brooks, Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative

“Everywhere in Balzac desire is an urge to find out, to know (Freud’s epistemophilia), which is to say that the drive to know is itself sexualized.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Sigmund Freud finished what was to be his final reading. “Freud did not read at random,” Schur tells us, “but carefully selected books from his library.”8 His final choice fell on Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin. When he finished the book—the day before he called for the fatal injection—he remarked to Schur: “This was the proper book for me to read; it deals with shrinking and starvation.” Not only with shrinking and starvation but with all that precedes the final outcome of human desire: wanting, having, possessing, devouring.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“İnsan yalnızca kelimenin tam anlamıyla insan olduğu zaman oyun oynar ve yalnızca oyun oynadığı zaman insandır.
Friedrich Schiller”
― Peter Brooks, Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative

“If Paris may itself be compared to a battlefield, in the post-Napoleonic, proto-capitalist Restoration the way you win in its struggles is not by arms—despite Vautrin’s rigged duel—but by insinuation, charm, gathering information, possessing social secrets.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“It’s possibly, in the manner of Facino Cane, one more allegory of the novelist: the abuse of the power to enter others’ lives, to animate them and tell their stories, leads to disaster. Humans have to be accorded a greater freedom, perhaps, even when that freedom means nonconformity to human definitions of reason and relationship.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Facino’s vision of vast riches and the novelist’s vision of the motives of human behavior are both attuned to the hidden, the dramatic, that, like Freud’s analyses, suggest an erotic charge that animates the world. They may speak also of a power beyond what is permitted to humankind”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Perhaps Balzac’s crazed philosopher Louis Lambert, another loner, identifies a corresponding vulnerability of the social world when he posits what he calls the “law of disorganization,” according to which the more complex a society becomes, the more differentiated in role and function, the more it loses cohesion. Lambert states: “When the effect produced is no longer related to its cause, there is disorganization.” That disorganization calls for heroic gestures in response, but they are doomed to succumb to social inertia.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Henry James in “The Lesson of Balzac” praised his precursor for giving his characters “the long rope,” for acting themselves out. That grant of freedom to his created life was for James crucial to Balzac’s success in representation of persons in the world. James saw Balzac’s creation of character as ultimately motivated by love: “The love, as we call it, the joy in their communicated and exhibited”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Rastignac’s story speaks to an age of revolution and counterrevolution, of blurred and reasserted class boundaries, a turbulent age in which the pursuit of wealth has taken on stark new importance. Success requires learning to read subtle distinctions of class and the meanings embodied in the Paris cityscape. In this bourgeois century where everyone looks alike you are going to have to find out for yourself who’s who. If you are ambitious and if you are out for love, you will need to choose wisely to advance your career. You need to understand both the social hierarchy and the economic substratum that lies hidden beneath it.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“You came back here that day with a word written on your forehead that I could read: ‘Succeed! Succeed at any price.’ ” To which Vautrin responds: “Bravo! That’s the kind of fellow I like.” (SC 111/P 3:139) To revolt is to take destiny into your own hands by a decisive act.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“the polite and polished superstructure of society must never be seen in relation to the substructure of money-grubbing and exploitation that allows it to exist.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“newspapers are “poison shops,” and Vignon piles on: The newspaper, instead of being a sacred mission, has become an arm for the political parties; and from that it became a commercial enterprise; and like all commercial enterprises it knows neither faith nor law. Every newspaper, as Blondet puts it, is a shop where one sells to the public words in whatever color it likes . . . all newspapers will in due course be cowardly, hypocritical, shameless, mendacious, murderous; they will kill ideas, systems, men, and will thrive from doing so.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Journalism, it turns out, is just so much hot air, hot type rather, that has an extraordinary importance at the moment but leaves nothing behind. It is the very opposite of the true poetic word that endures—what Lucien originally aspired to but betrayed”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Blindness and madness punish the hubris of the man who possesses and employs a faculty for knowledge not given to other men.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“We need novels in order to enter the minds of others. But that project can run up against the opacities of other minds and spirits. When a man tells us of a woman’s desiring, we should beware of blindness.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“As Baudelaire remarked, even Balzac’s concierges have genius; everyone in his world is “stuffed with willpower from head to toe.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Balzac’s semiotics is all about detection, the need to discover who people really are.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Collin, the man who cannot be killed off, whose identity is both branded on him and rendered illegible, challenges, or defies, the very coherence of such an entity, suggesting the possibility that the very subject of The Human Comedy, human society itself, is at bottom an illusion if not a fraud.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“No woman, believe me, will want to rub elbows with the dead woman you keep in your heart.” (CG 254/P 9:1127) Félix, she understands, cannot detach himself from the dead Henriette. And also from himself: she accuses him of an incurable egotism. If he continues to unburden himself to other women as he has to her, they will perceive “the aridity of your heart, and you will always be unhappy”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Goriot was “a grease spot in his daughters’ drawing rooms.” Once they squeezed the money out of him he’s discarded “like a lemon peel” in the gutter. The moral drawn by the Duchesse: “Society is a mudhole. Let’s try to remain up on the heights.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“In his last incarnation, Collin sees only one position for himself: to serve the power that weighs on us all. He proposes to replace Bibi-Lupin as head of the Sûreté. “I have no other ambition than to be an instrument of law and repression instead of corruption. . . . I am the general of the underworld and I surrender.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Balzac knew intuitively the need for invented persons to represent life for us, with an enhanced sense of the odds and stakes of life. Representation for Balzac always touched on the theatrical, offering life bathed in starker, more revealing light.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives

“Balzac, very much like Freud in his most speculative essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, discovers that the pleasure principle is inextricably bound up with its opposite, the death drive.”
― Peter Brooks, Balzac's Lives