228 Quotes by Romain Gary

I’m an old naturalist. I defend all the roots that God has planted deep in the earth — and also the ones He has planted forever in the human soul — call it a need for justice, for freedom, for dignity . . .

Peer Qvist, grasping the Bible in his hands and reaffirming to the Court his determination to carry on his defense of the whole infinite variety of roots which Heaven had planted in the earth and also in the depths of the human soul — roots which gripped them like a premonition and a longing, a tortured aspiration, a craving for justice, for dignity, freedom and love.

He thought of all that the newspapers were printing about him. Each man attributed to him his own hopes, his own motives and rancors, and his own secret misanthropy: it was in vain that he stated his own aims clearly; there was nothing he could do about it. And yet the truth was clear; it could hardly be clearer. He loved all those free roots that gave their beauty to the earth and to man’s life on it. He loved nature, and he had always done his best to defend it.

..he also noticed that certain things which he felt deeply changed their meaning at the touch of words, so that he could no longer recognize them himself as he spoke. So that indeed he often wondered whether thinking were enough, whether thoughts were not a mere groping for something that was forever out of reach...

باران می آمد و روی شیروانی ترانه می نواخت: ترانه ای که اگه آدم اون رو شب، در امنِ آغوش او گوش کنه زیباترین ترانۀ دنیاست. هر قدر باد شدیدتر باشه و بارون تند تر بیاد بازوهاش محکمتر دورت فشرده میشه و تو توی بغلش راحت تری و دیگه از هیچ چیز نمی ترسی. دست کم این احساس منه. تمام عمرم صدای بارون روی شیروانی رو تنها شنیدم. بارون دوست نداره کسی تنها ترانه اش رو گوش بده. من ناکامیش رو خوب حس می کنم

Boldel de saclé nom de Dieu ! dit alors en bâillant le bébé sur le plancher. Boldel de saclé nom de Dieu, quelle famille ! Vous avez pas un journal ou quelque chose ? On s'emmelde ici !

L’amour, tu sais, ce dont il a le plus besoin, c’est l’imagination. Il faut que chacun invente l’autre avec toute son imagination, avec toutes ses forces et qu’il ne cède pas un pouce du terrain à la réalité ; alors, là, lorsque deux imaginations se rencontrent… Il n’y a rien de plus beau.

An unbearable reality, combined with the impossibility to change it, tends to lead to abstractions for abstraction's sake, and unreality becomes more realistic than reality itself, more true, more convincing, simply because it looks at you with the eyes of justice.

Not that I had any intention of accosting him to propose any practical agreement. That would have demanded on Laura's part a degree of devotion, of understanding, a detached view of the purely animal act of love, such as could not be expected of so young a woman who was so subject conventions of comportment in a society that had always shown itself incapable of differentiating between love and sexuality.