280 Quotes by Michel Houellebecq

Men in general don’t know how to live: they have no true familiarity with life, and never feel entirely at ease in it, so they pursue different projects, more or less ambitious and more or less grandiose – generally speaking, of course, they fail and reach the conclusion that they would have been better off just living, but as a rule by that point it’s too late.

And I no longer even know where the source is; at present, everything looks the same. The landscape is more and more gentle, amiable, joyous; my skin hurts. I am at the heart of the abyss. I feel my skin again as a frontier, and the external world as a crushing weight. The impression of separation is total; from now on I am imprisoned within myself. It will not take place, the sublime fusion; the goal of life is missed. It is two in the afternoon.

All I knew was that once again I found myself alone, with even less desire to live and nothing to look forward to but aggravations.

We turn our eyes to the heavens, and the heavens are empty.

It’s hard to understand other people, to know what’s hidden in their hearts, and without the assistance of alcohol it might never be done at all.

Animals live without feeling the least need of justification, as do the crushing majority of men. They live because they live, and then I suppose they die because they die, and for them that’s all there is to it.

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head – it has the same shape as the human brain.

Hidden all day in impenetrable black burkas, rich Saudi women transformed themselves by night into birds of paradise with their corsets, their see-through bras, their G-strings with multicolored lace and rhinestones. They were exactly the opposite of Western women, who spent their days dressed up and looking sexy to maintain their social status, then collapsed in exhaustion once they got home, abandoning all hope of seduction in favor of clothes that were loose and shapeless.

To give a man 5 sous because he is poor and has no bread is perfect, but to give him a blowjob because he has no girlfriend is too much of a good thing: you don’t have to do that.