Toxos e Libros

“Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain Beauty. When you speak, or read, or write, you can tell if you've spoken or read or written a fine sentence. You can recognise a well-tuned phrase or an elegant style. But when you are applying the rules of grammar skilfully, you ascend to another level of the beauty of language. When you use grammar you peel back the layers, to see how it is all put together, to see it quite naked, in a way.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent, condemns one, in our society, to a dark and disillusioned life, a condition one ought to accept at an early age. To beauty, all is forgiven, even vulgarity. Intelligence no longer seems an adequate compensation for things – some sort of balancing of the scales offered by nature to those less favored among her children – no, it is a superfluous plaything that exists only to enhance the value of the jewel.
Pg 47.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“We have to live with the certainty that we'll get old and that it won't look nice or be good or feel happy. And tell ourselves that it's nowt hat matters: to build something, now, at any price, using all our strength.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“..when I say that "he's a truly nasty man," I mean he has so thoroughly renounced everything good that he might have inside him that he's already like a corpse even though he's still alive. Because truly nasty people hate everyone, to be sure, but most of all themselves. Can't you tell when a person hates himself? He becomes a living cadaver, it numbs all his negative emotions but also all the good ones so he won't feel nauseated by who he is.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog