24 Quotes by Laurent Binet

How many forgotten heroes sleep in history’s great cemetery?

You had to choose between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor. You will have war.

So, to cut a long story short, they jumped.

The good thing about writing a true story is that you don’t have to worry about giving an impression of realism.

As Umberto Eco might say: for communicating, language is perfect; there could be nothing better. And yet, language doesn’t say everything. The body speaks, objects speak, history speaks, individual or collective destinies speak, life and death speak to us constantly in a thousand different ways. Man is an interpreting machine and, with a little imagination, he sees signs everywhere.

The dead are dead, and it makes no difference to them whether I pay homage to their deeds. But for us, the living, it does mean something. Memory is of no use to the remembered, only to those who remember. We build ourselves with memory and console ourselves with memory.