Julien Green > Quotes

“I am probably exaggerating a little, but I owe my equilibrium to ink and paper.”
― Julien Green

“Faith means walking on the waters.”
― Julien Green, L'Avenir n'est à personne: Journal

“But nowadays my heart is empty and the boxwood has lost its magic scent; yes, absolutely and entirely. The creature that I was no longer exists. When I speak to her she does not understand me; I think of her, already, as of some one I have known but who no longer has any connection with myself.

This sort of death of part of oneself strikes terror into my heart.
Life presents itself to me as a progressive series of annihilations, until in time one arrives at the general destruction of all memory and the barren slumber of one's conscience.”
― Julien Green, Le Visionnaire

“I enter the world called real as one enters a mist. Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them. I don't want to go on playing in a world where everyone cheats. Where everyone cheats - not only men and women, but sometimes even God.”
― Julien Green, L'Avenir n'est à personne: Journal

“Notre vie est un livre qui s'écrit tout seul. Nous sommes des personnages de roman qui ne comprennent pas toujours bien ce que veut l'auteur.”
― Julien Green

“The greatest explorer on this earth never takes voyages as long as those of the man who descends to the depth of his heart.”
― Julien Green

“A novelist is like a scout commissioned to go and see what is happening in the depth of the soul. He comes back and reports what he has observed. He never lives on the surface but only inhabits the darkest regions”
― Julien Green, L'Avenir n'est à personne: Journal

“Paris is a city that might well be spoken of in the plural, as the Greeks used to speak of Athens, for there are many Parises, and the tourists’ Paris is only superficially related to the Paris of the Parisians. The foreigner driving through Paris from one museum to another is quite oblivious to the presence of a world he brushes past without seeing. Until you have wasted time in a city, you cannot pretend to know it well. The soul of a big city is not to be grasped so easily; in order to make contact with it, you have to have been bored, you have to have suffered a bit in those places that contain it. Anyone can get hold of a guide and tick off all the monuments, but within the very confines of of Paris there is another city as difficult to access as Timbuktu once was.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“In growing older, we become our parents.”
― Julien Green

“Sometimes we do things, without thinking, that make no sense to us until much later, and yet appear to have been prompted by the most alert part of our being.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“Copying is out of the question; only fools and impostors copy. No, the thing is to produce something as good, if possible, out of your own resources. And so begins the strange torture of the blank sheet of paper, where you must open a window that is not the one I spotted just now but one equally insistent in its truthfulness.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“I knew that we counted little in comparison with the universe, I knew that we were nothing; but to be so immeasurably nothing seems in some way both to overwhelm and at the same time to reassure. Those figures, those dimensions beyond the range of human thought, are utterly overpowering. Is there anything whatsoever to which we can cling? Amid that chaos of illusions into which we are cast headlong, there is one thing that stands out as true, and that is---love. All the rest is nothingness, an empty void. We peer down into a huge dark abyss. And we are afraid.”
― Julien Green, Personal record, 1928-1939

“What we give the world, we have borrowed from no one; it is ours. It may be taken from us, stolen from us, but imitated? - never.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“I have always thought that by observing things with a great deal of attention you eventually wrest some of their secrets from them, making them utter what they would most like to keep to themselves.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“On ne sait jamais quand la vie va vous trahir ; inutile de compter sur le lendemain, ni même sur l'heure qui va suivre ; il n'y a de certain que la mort.”
― Julien Green, Léviathan

“Bom ou mau, aquilo que sai da Paris é Paris, seja uma carta, um pedaço de pão, um par de sapatos ou um poema.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“Die Welt war voll von Leuten, die ihren Weg wußten, die einen hierhin, die andern dorthin. Wo, in diesem System aus Sorgen und Freuden, war mein Platz? Ich empfand mich als das reichste und zugleich nutzloseste der Wesen. Wie war es nur möglich, daß Menschen bereit waren, zum Beispiel stundenlang die Säle des Luxembourg zu bewachen, oder im Senat vor sich hin zu dösen, oder in einem Ladenkontor Rechnungen zu schreiben? Was besagte diese Ordnung, die das Leben abtötete? Denn allein die Tatsache 'Leben' ist bedrückend, und man gewöhnt sich daran wohl nur, indem man sich mit idiotischen Beschäftigungen überhäuft. Ich aber war von meinem bloßen Dasein erschöpft.”
― Julien Green

“A cidade, efectivamente, sorri apenas àqueles que se aproximam dela e que deambulam pelas suas ruas; a esses, ela fala numa linguagem tranquilizadora e familiar, mas a alma de Paris só se revela de longe e do alto, e é no silêncio do céu que se escuta o imenso grito patético de orgulho e de fé que ela eleva na direcção das nuvens.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“Paris … is loath to surrender itself to people who are in a hurry; it belongs to the dreamers.…”
― Julian Green, Paris

“...quando me passeio por Passy parece-me que deambulo por dentro de mim mesmo e que tropeço incessantemente na minha infância.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“ La beauté est un prodige qu'un rien peut anéantir et qui ne devrait s'admirer que de loin, elle s'efface d'une manière aussi difficilement explicable que sa présence même et l'homme n'y porte jamais qu'une main sacrilège. ”
― Julien Green, Léviathan

“The novelist is like a scout commissioned to go and see what is happening in the depth of the soul. He comes back and reports what he has observed.”
― Julien Green

“I am the road running through Paris," says the Seine. 'I have carried off many images since you were a child and reflected many clouds. I am changeable, but as people are: I have my moments of happiness in the June dawn and my sinister times some December evenings. Above all I am inquisitive - you call it being in flood. We have something in common, you everlasting passers-by and I, the fleeing water, which is that we never go back: your time is my space.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“A alma de uma grande cidade não se deixa apreender facilmente; é preciso, para se comunicar com ela, termo-nos aborrecido, termos de algum modo sofrido nos lugares que a circunscrevem.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“Things we could not tell each other with the width of the Atlantic between us we communicated from heart to heart in those imaginary conversations.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“and at that point the church quietly articulated these words, which tell us something of the secret of old buildings: 'The worse I am threatened, the lovelier I become.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“Have you never noticed how absorbed people look as they climb from floor to floor? So many resolutions reached, so many anxious questions to which the answers lie in wait behind the door that is about to open! Here on the stairs is the time and the place for making up your mind, that final moment for reflection before you take the plunge. As a result there appears to linger, in some of those great circular stairwells, a residue of the dreams that they have sheltered, a memory, as it were, of the meditations in which love, lust, and world-weariness fought for the hearts of all the nameless people who ever passed that way.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“Oare cunosc si altii spaima de-a merge pe-o strada gandindu-te cu deznadejde la toate strazile pe care nu te afli, strazile unde cei care ar vrea sa te cunoasca te asteapta si pleaca, nevazand pe nimeni venind?”
― Julien Green, L'Avenir n'est à personne: Journal

“Anderswo, morgen, das sind für Sie immer noch magische Worte. Aber sie werden entdecken: anderswo, das ist hier, und morgen haben wir bereits.”
― Julien Green, Der Unbekannte

“Il n'y a pas de hasard, il n'y a que des méchancetés du sort et ses perfidies, préparées de longue main, n'ont cette apparence fortuite que parce que les dessous nous en échappent.”
― Julien Green, Léviathan