French Literature Quotes

Death, my son, is a good thing for all men; it is the night for this worried day that we call life. It is in the sleep of death that finds rest for eternity the sickness, pain, desperation, and the fears that agitate, without end, we unhappy living souls.

~ Jacques-Henri Bernardin De Saint-Pierre

He suffered greatly from being shut up among all these people whose stupidity and absurdities wounded him all the more cruelly since, being ignorant of his love, incapable, had they known of it, of taking any interest, or of doing more than smile at it as at some childish joke, or deplore it as an act of insanity, they made it appear to him in the aspect of a subjective state which existed for himself alone, whose reality there was nothing external to confirm; he suffered overwhelmingly, to the point at which even the sound of the instruments made him want to cry, from having to prolong his exile in this place to which Odette would never come, in which no one, nothing was aware of her existence, from which she was entirely absent.

~ Marcel Proust

...After you have done everything to please a man and he's taken his pleasure with you, all you are for him is a whore, and a whore's daughter.

~ Pierre Louÿs

No one's serious at seventeen,When lindens line the promenades

~ Arthur Rimbaud

Let's not worry. It's too late now. It will always be too late, fortunately!

~ Albert Camus