23 Quotes by Mathias Énard

... pleasure is a lightning-bolt that leaves no trace…

Since the dawn of time people have had to humiliate themselves before the Caesars.

.. everything is more difficult once you reach man’s estate, everything rings falser, but sometimes the gods offer you flashes of clairvoyance, moments when you contemplate the whole universe, the infinite wheel of worlds, you see yourself, from high up, for few instants truly before leaving, propelled into the next thing, toward the end…

And, more than anything, he loved drawing, the black wound of the ink, that caress scraping the grain of the paper.

Michelangelo dreams of a banquet from long ago, when you could discuss Eros without your speech being slurred by wine, without your elocution being impaired by it, when beauty was only contemplation of beauty, far from these ugly moments prefiguring death, when bodies fought no longer against their fluids, their moods, their desires. He dreams of an ideal banquet, where table companions wouldn’t reel from fatigue or alcohol, when all vulgarity would be banished for the sake of art.

How many works of art will there have to be to put beauty into the world?

Your drunkenness is so sweet to me that it intoxicates me. You are breathing gently. You are alive. I would like to move over to your side of the world, see into your dreams.

Calligraphies are our images, Maestro, images of our faith.

At first sight Mesihi’s is a very different art: the height of the letter, the thickness of the line that gives movement, the disposition of the consonants, space stretching out according to sounds. Clinging to his reed pen, the calligrapher-poet gives a face to words, to phrases, to lines or verses.