280 Quotes by Michel Houellebecq

Unhappiness isn’t at its most acute point until a realistic chance of happiness, sufficiently close, has been envisioned.

Toynbee’s idea that civilizations die not by murder but by suicide.

The mere will to live was clearly no match for the pains and aggravations that punctuate the life of the average Western man.

You really can’t do anything about people’s lives, I said to myself, neither friendship nor compassion nor the intelligence of the situations is of any use: people manufacture the mechanism of their own misfortune, they wind it right up and the mechanism goes on turning.

The press may hate me, and I know my battles with them are not over, but that doesn’t matter.

It is in our relations with other people that we gain a sense of ourselves; it’s that, pretty much, that makes relations with other people unbearable.

I think that if writers don’t speak about real life, it’s because they don’t know it.

I’ve lived so little that I tend to imagine I’m not going to die; it seems improbable that human existence can be reduced to so little; one imagines, in spite of oneself, that sooner or later something is bound to happen. A big mistake. A life can just as well be both empty and short. The days slip by indifferently, leaving neither trace nor memory; and then all of a sudden they stop. At times, too, I’ve had the impression that I’d manage to feel quite at home in a life of vacuity. That.

No one in the West will ever be happy again, she also thought, never again; happiness today is nothing but an old dream, the past conditions for its existence are simply no longer being fulfilled.