Andreï Makine > Quotes

“People speak because they are afraid of silence. They speak mechanically whether aloud or to themselves. They are intoxicated by this vocal gruel that ensnares every object and every being. They talk about rain and fine weather; they talk about money, about love, about nothing. And even when they are talking about their most exalted love, they use words uttered a hundred times, threadbare phrases.”
― Andrei Makine

“(...) the translator of prose is the slave of the author and the translator of poetry is his rival.”
― Andreï Makine

“...she studies to be equal in a world that is no longer surprised at anything”
― Andrei Makine, The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

“As his hands fell upon the keyboard, it was still possible to believe a beautiful harmony had been formed at random, in spite of him. But a second later the music came surging out, the power of it sweeping away all doubts, voices, sounds, wiping away the fixed grins and exchanged glances, pushing back the walls, dispersing the light of the reception room out into the nocturnal immensity of the sky beyond the windows.

He did not feel as if he were playing. He was advancing through a night, breathing in its delicate transparency, made up as it was of an infinite number of facets of ice, of leaves, of wind. He no longer felt any pain. No fear about what would happen. No anguish or remorse. The night through which he was advancing expressed this pain, this fear, and the irremediable shattering of the past, but this had all become music and now only existed through its beauty.”
― Andreï Makine, Music of a Life

“This happiness rendered absurd men's desire to dominate, to kill, to possess, thought Volsky. For neither Mila nor he possessed anything. Their joy came from the things one does not possess, from what other people had abandoned or scorned. But, above all, this sunset, this scent of warm bark, these clouds above the young trees in the graveyard, these belonged to everybody!”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man

“The life these words speak of is not worth the ink they are written in.... He now knows that the only words worth writing down arise when language is impossible.”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man

“They did not speak, surprised to see how simple, almost poor, happiness could be, yes, materially poor and yet so abundant.”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man

“Love is in essence subversive.”
― Andreï Makine

“Men can be pitiless towards a woman whose body has eluded them, particularly if this is thanks to their own cowardice.”
― Andreï Makine, The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

“I have just awoken, having dreamed of music. The final chord fades away within me while I try to focus on individuals amid the living, breathing mass packed into this vast waiting room, in this mixture of sleep and weariness.”
― Andreï Makine

“The fatal mistake we make is looking for a paradise that endures...This obsession with what lasts causes us to overlook many a fleeting paradise.”
― Andreï Makine

“The though revives in him the oldest memory of his life. A child sees a door closing: without knowing who it is that has just left, he senses it is someone he loves with all his tiny, still mute being.”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man

“All of this seemed equally trifling to him now. And when he thought again about the world of free people, the difference between it and the miseries and joys of this place seemed minimal. If three tiny fragments of tea leaf chanced to fall into a prisoner's battered cup, he relished them. In Leningrad during the interval at the opera a woman sipped champagne with the same pleasure. Their sufferings were also comparable. Both the prisoner and the woman had painful shoes. Hers were narrow evening shoes which she took off during the performance. The prisoner suffered from what they wore in the camp, section of tyres into which you thrust your foot wrapped in rags and fastened with string. The woman at the opera knew that somewhere in the world there were millions of beings transformed into gaunt animals, their faces blackened by the polar winds. But this did not stop her drinking her glass of wine amid the glittering of the great mirrors. The prisoner knew that a warm and brilliant life was lived elsewhere in tranquility but this did not spoil his pleasure as he chewed those fragments of tea leaf....”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man

“This sacrifice, which saved his life, reminded him again that the evil of this world could be put to rout by the will of a single human being.”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man

“their life will be made of the same stuff as this spring afternoon.”
― Andreï Makine, Music of a Life

“Their own life together was like a subtle watercolor sketch, invisible to other people. They gave the world what it required of them and for the rest of the time were content to be forgotten.”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man

“He had already come to see human lives as one single communal life and it was perhaps this perception that gave him hope.”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man

“In war the most testing moments are those of peace , for a dead man lying in the grass makes the living see the world as it would be, but for their folly.”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man

“That apple orchard is still in flower," I told myself. "Time has passed it by, leaving it behind in a moment that does not pass. An idea that seems as insane as the beauty of those flowering trees that will never bear fruit. But to believe in it gives a supreme meaning to our lives, our encounters, our loves."

Then I caught myself mentally addressing Kira, as on so many occasions during these last twenty years.

The truth is, I have never stopped walking beside her along an endless corridor lined with snow-clad boughts.”
― Andreï Makine, Le livre des brèves amours éternelles

“An exile's only country is his country's literature.”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man

“The fatal mistake we make is looking for a paradise that endures …

What remains is a fleeting paradise that lives on for all time, having no need of doctrines.”
― Andreï Makine, Brief Loves That Live Forever

“Historians rewrite the truth every day. What interests us is the truth that gets the reader to reach for his wallet”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man

“Quand la mort nous regarde calmement dans les yeux, nous nous rendons compte qu'il y a eu dans notre vie quelques heures, de soleil ou de nuit, quelques visages auxquels nous revenons sans cesse, et qu'en fait ce qui nous rendait vivants, c'est les simple espoir de les retrouver...”
― Andreï Makine, L'Amour humain

“Once again, without explaining anything, they understood that they must leave. Go away before this world woke up and continued with a life from which they were forever excluded.”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man

“Tilting her head back, she plunged in among the stars for a long time. A silent, unflagging wind descended from these nocturnal depths. . . . The shadow of the wood, the dark reflection of the water, the dim fields on the opposite bank. The sky from which spilled the powerful and constant wind. All this lived, breathed, and seemed to see her, to be focusing some kind of infinite gaze upon her. A gaze that understood everything but did not judge. It was there, facing her, about her, within her. Everything was said by this immense wordless, motionless presence. . . . The wind was still blowing from the summit of the sky, from its dark reaches scarcely marked with the buoys of stars. She was responding to the eyes staring at her, impassive eyes, but whose absolute compassion she sensed. . . .”
― Andreï Makine, The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

“Volsky once more had the feeling that the bond between them was indifferent to the demise of bodies.”
― Andreï Makine, The Life of an Unknown Man

“Then, with all my being I felt I was wildly, desperately in love. Not only with Maya and her dark locks flying in the wind as she ran. But also with the plants that swayed as she passed, and with that grey, sad sky and the air that smelled of rain. I was even in love with that old piece of farm machinery with flat tyres, sensing that it was quite essential to the harmony that had just been created before my eyes …”
― Andreï Makine, Brief Loves That Live Forever

“He should have told Vlad that in the old days a collection of poems could change your life, but a single poem could also cost the life of its author.”
― Andreï Makine

“,,Franța nu mai era pentru mine o simplă colecție de curiozități, ci o făptură sensibilă și consistentă, din care, într-o zi, o fărâmă fusese grefată în mine.”
― Andreï Makine

“The loudspeaker on the wall crackles, hisses, and suddenly announces, in astonishingly soothing tones, that a train is going to be delayed. An ocean swell of sighs ripples through the waiting room.”
― Andreï Makine