Romain Gary
The Roots of Heaven is a novel by the French writer Romain Gary and one of his most notable works, alongside The Life Before Us.
Gary was born Roman Kacew on 21 May 1914 in Vilnius, and he went on to become a French citizen. He was educated at Lycée Masséna, then at Paul Cézanne University, and later at the Paris Law Faculty. Before his literary career took hold, he served as a military aviator, and he also worked as a diplomat. He wrote in both French and Russian, and he published under more than one name: he used the pen name Émile Ajar and is also recorded under the name René Deville.
The pen name Émile Ajar turned out to be more than a simple alias. Gary received the Prix Goncourt, and he remains the only author to have won that prize twice — a distinction that sets him apart from every other writer in the award's history. His use of multiple identities meant that his full output as a writer was spread across more than one name, making his place in French letters an unusual one.
Gary died on 2 December 1980 in the 7th arrondissement of Paris. As well as his writing, he had worked as a film director. He left behind a body of work carrying two different names and two separate Prix Goncourt citations, a fact that places him in a category entirely his own.
Quotes by Romain Gary
Romain Gary's insights on:
The difference between the English and the rest of mankind is that the English have long known the truth about themselves – which makes them always able to evade it discreetly, to slip round it.
Racism is when it doesn’t count. When they don’t count. When one can do anything with them, it doesn’t matter what, because they are not people like us. Do you see? Not our kind. When we can make use of them as we please, without losing face, dignity, honor. Without embarrassment, without making a moral judgement – that’s it. When we can make them do no matter what degrading work, service, because their opinion of us doesn’t count, because it cannot tarnish us. That’s what racism is.
Bruno, someday you will die of kindness, tolerance and gentleness. Well, given the options, it isn’t a bad way to go.
My hints had, undoubtedly and unintentionally, made her feel insecure, guilty, inadequate, afraid that she was losing whatever it was that turned me on; in short, it aroused all the self-doubt so readily awakened in women after thousands of years of servitude. Hence my zeal in denying the effects of time was abetted by Laura’s complicity.
The inhumanity of it is what makes Nazism so horrible – that’s what people always say. Sure. But there’s no denying the obvious: part of being human is the inhumanity of it. As long as we refuse to admit that inhumanity is completely human, we’ll just be telling ourselves pious lies.
I too have often felt the need to understand it all; but I know my limits. In my life I’ve done more suffering than thinking – though I believe one understands better that way.
Je n’avais encore jamais vu un sourire aussi immuable et je me demandais si elle l’enlevait pour dormir.
It’s absolutely essential that man should manage to preserve something other than what helps to make soles for shoes or sewing machines, that he should leave a margin, a sanctuary, where some of life’s beauty can take refuge and where he himself can feel safe from his own cleverness and folly. Only then will it be possible to begin talking of civilization.
I don’t consider myself to be definite, but in waiting position and eventual appearance.
Printing mistakes adds value because of the probability calculus, which makes their intrusion into something problematic and almost impossible, even when everything’s conceived, precisely, to avoid the intrusion of human error.