107 Quotes by Amélie Nothomb

Hélas, on a l'âge de sa mémoire, n'est-ce pas? Et non de ses artères, comme disent les imbéciles.

Ten is the most sunlit moment of growing up.

– Je ne pense pas avoir d'enfants.– Ah. Pourquoi? Ce n'est pas normal.Je m'en allai en fredonnant dans ma tête la chanson de Brassens : « Non, les brav's gens n'aiment pas que / L'on suive une autre route qu'eux. »

If I knew what I was thinking [...] I would never have become a writer.

If a writer manages to be fascinating about his own novels, then there are only two possibilities: either he is merely voicing out loud what he wrote in his book, and he is a parrot; or he is explaining interesting things that he didn't discuss in his book, in which case the book in question is a failure since it does not live up to its claims.

There is only one way to overcome the difficulty of writing, and that is to write. Thought only becomes effective and productive at the time of writing.

The war began in 1972. That was the year I awoke to a profound truth: no one on this earth is indispensable, except the enemy. ¶ Without an enemy, human beings are poor things indeed. Their lives are ordeals, crushed between insignificance and boredom. ¶ The enemy is the Savior. His mere existence is enough to revitalize humanity. Thanks to the enemy, that unfortunate accident called life becomes epic.

Para bailar, hay que merecerlo. Bailar sobre un escenario y delante de público constituye la mayor de las felicidades. A decir verdad, incluso sin público, incluso sin escenario, bailar es el colmo de la embriaguez. Una alegría tan profunda justifica los sacrificios más crueles. La educación que os damos aquí tiende a presentar la danza como lo que es: no un medio sino una recompensa.

They went on to support their thesis by citing authors with esoteric names, whose works they themselves had not read, a fact which enabled them to speak about them penetratingly.