15 Quotes by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

For the painful essence of withdrawal does not reside in the present suffering it brings – withdrawal is painless on the level of the immediate moment – but in the prospect of suffering to come, the rich future that one can imagine one’s torture enjoying.

She misunderstood my method, in my opinion, not realizing that my approach, rather obscure to those unfamiliar, was based on the idea that in my struggle with reality, I could exhaust any opponent with whom I was grappling, like one can wear out an olive, for example, before successfully stabbing it with a fork, and that my propensity not to hasten matters, far from having a negative effect, in fact prepared for me a fertile ground where, when things seemed ripe, I could make my move with ease.

Once again, it seemed, I was discovering the truth of the rule, a rule I’d never explicitly formulated to myself, but whose veracity I’d quite often sensed in a vague sort of way, which was that the chances of seeing an idea through to completion are inversely proportional to the time you’ve spent talking about it beforehand.

In the street, asked a running man the way to the post office. I’ve always enjoyed asking people in a hurry for information.

And yet that’s the best way to watch television actively: with your eyes closed.

I walked head down, pressing my feet down hard on the pavement to push the city under water... With the town sinking at the rate of thirty centimeters a century, I explained, or three millimeters a year, or point zero zero zero zero zero zero one millimeter a second, one might reasonably hope, by pressing our feet down hard on the pavement as we walked, to play some part in the drowning of the town.