Quotes by Michel Houellebecq - Page 2

A reactionary is someone who wants to return to a previous state - that's never a possibility in my books. For me, everything's irreversible in the life of a society, as well as an individual's.
Michel Houellebecq / Author
Book
Irreversible
Possibility
Return
Want
Life Society Me
Previous
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I admit that invective is one of my pleasures. This only brings me problems in life, but that's it. I attack, I insult. I have a gift for that, for insults, for provocation. So I am tempted to use it.
Michel Houellebecq / Author
Insult
Problem
Provocation
Tempted
Use
Life I Am Me
Admit
Attack
Brings
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On Sunday morning I went out for a while in the neighbourhood; I bought some raisin bread. The day was warm but a little sad, as Sundays often are in Paris, especially when one doesn't believe in God.
Michel Houellebecq / Author
Morning
Believe
Sunday
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I find it an absolute pleasure to read travel guides, especially the Michelin guides, and their description of places I know I'll probably never visit. I spend a large part of my life reading descriptions of restaurants.
Michel Houellebecq / Author
Description
Guides
Pleasure
Restaurants
Life Travel My Life
Absolute
Large Part
Visit
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Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.
Michel Houellebecq / Author
Littles
Love Life
World
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When we think about the present, we veer wildly between the belief in chance and the evidence in favour of determinism. When we think about the past, however, it seems obvious that everything happened in the way that it was intended.
Michel Houellebecq / Author
Past
Thinking
Way
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The terrible predicament of a beautiful girl is that only an experienced womanizer, someone cynical and without scruple, feels up to the challenge. More often than not, she will lose her virginity to some filthy lowlife in what proves to be the first step in an irrevocable decline.
Michel Houellebecq / Author
Girl
Beautiful
Cynical
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An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would have suited me best. Such a life has not been granted me.
Michel Houellebecq / Author
Age
Believe
Reading
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Depressive lucidity, usually described as a radical withdrawal from ordinary human concerns, generally manifests itself by a profound indifference to things which are genuinely of minor interest. Thus it is possible to imagine a depressed lover, while the idea of a depressed patriot seems frankly inconceivable.
Michel Houellebecq / Author
Ideas
Ordinary
Profound
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I feel as if things are falling apart within me, like so many glass partitions shattering. I walk from place to place in the grip of a fury, needing to act, yet can do nothing about it because any attempt seems doomed in advance. Failure, everywhere failure. Only suicide hovers above me, gleaming and inaccessible.
Michel Houellebecq / Author
Fall
Glasses
Suicide
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I think that there is a sharp contrast for most people between life at university, where they meet lots of people, and the moment when they enter the workforce, when they basically no longer meet anyone. Life becomes dull. So as a result people get married to have a personal life. I could elaborate but I think everyone understands.
Michel Houellebecq / Author
Contrast
Personal Life
University
Workforce
Life Moment People
Elaborate
Get Married
Sharp
Understands
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Last election shows that there's a big discrepancy between two parts of the country. That discrepancy also exists in France, but we've had the National Front for forty years, and it only took Trump one year to get elected. Very fast. That's the surprising thing. In France we thought everybody liked Obama, but maybe the media were lying. Maybe they didn't.
Michel Houellebecq / Author
Country
Election
Lying
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To the end, I will remain a child of Europe, of worry and of shame. I have no message of hope to deliver. For the West, I do not feel hatred. At most I feel a great contempt. I know only that every single one of us reeks of selfishness, masochism and death. We have created a system in which it has simply become impossible to live, and what's more, we continue to export it.
Michel Houellebecq / Author
Children
Europe
Worry
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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.
Michel Houellebecq / Author
Leaving
Memories
Mistake
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Irony won't save you from anything; humour doesn't do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn't matter how brave you are, or how reserved, or how much you've developed a sense of humour, you still end up with your heart broken. That's when you stop laughing.
Michel Houellebecq / Author
Heart
People
Years
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I think she is going to find you too old... Yes that was it, the moment she said it I knew it was true, and the revelation caused me no surprise, it was like the echo of a dull, not unexpected shock. The age difference was the last taboo, the final limit, all the stronger for the fact that it remained the last and had replaced all the others. In the modern world you could be a swinger, bi, trans, zoo into S&M, but it was forbidden to be old.
Michel Houellebecq / Author
Zoos
Age Difference
Echoes
Thinking
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Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women, others with none. It’s what’s known as ‘the law of the market’… In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude.
Michel Houellebecq / Author
Men
Law
People
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it’s true this world our breathing laboured inspires nothing more than obvious disgust a desire to flee without our share and no longer read the headlines we long to return to our ancestral home where our forebears once lived under an angel’s wing we long to find that strange morality which sanctified life to the end we crave something like loyalty like the embrace of mild addictions something that transcends yet contains life we cannot live far from eternity
Michel Houellebecq / Author
Loyalty
Home
Angel
Breathing
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This progressive effacement of human relationships is not without certain problems for the novel. How, in point of fact, would one handle the narration of those unbridled passions, stretching over many years, and at times making their effect felt on several generations? We’re a long way from Wuthering Heights, to say the least. The novel form is not conceived for depicting indifference or nothingness; a flatter, more terse, and dreary discourse would need to be invented.
Michel Houellebecq / Author
Long
Passion
Years
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A source of permanent, accessible pleasure, our genitals exist. The god who created our misfortune, who made us short-lived, vain and cruel, has also provided this form of meagre compensation. If we couldn't have sex from time to time, what would life be? A futile struggle against joints that stiffen, caries that form. All of which, moreover, is as uninteresting as humanly possible - the collagen which makes muscles stiffen, the appearance of microbic cavities in the gums.
Michel Houellebecq / Author
Gum
Sex
Struggle
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It is interesting to note that the "sexual revolution" was sometimes portrayed as a communal utopia, whereas in fact it was simply another stage in the historical rise of individualism. As the lovely word "household" suggests, the couple and the family would be the last bastion of primitive communism in liberal society. The sexual revolution was to destroy these intermediary communities, the last to separate the individual from the market. The destruction continues to this day.
Michel Houellebecq / Author
Community
Couple
Interesting
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I hadn’t seen any novel make the statement that entering the workforce was like entering the grave. That from then on, nothing happens and you have to pretend to be interested in your work. And, furthermore, that some people have a sex life and others don’t just because some are more attractive than others. I wanted to acknowledge that if people don’t have a sex life, it’s not for some moral reason, it’s just because they’re ugly. Once you’ve said it, it sounds obvious, but I wanted to say it.
Michel Houellebecq / Author
Entering
People
Sex
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Without beauty a girl is unhappy because she has missed her chance to be loved. People do not jeer at her, they are not cruel to her, but it is as if she were invisible, no eyes follow her as she walks. People feel uncomfortable when they are with her. They find it easier to ignore her. A girl who is exceptionally beautiful, on the other hand, who has something which too far surpasses the customary seductive freshness of adolescence, appears somehow unreal. Great beauty seems invariably to portend some tragic fate.
Michel Houellebecq / Author
Girl
Beautiful
Eye
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Of course, we can distinguish between males and females; we can also, if we choose, distinguish between different age categories; but any more advanced distinction comes close to pedantry, probably a result of boredom. A creature that is bored elaborates distinctions and hierarchies. According to Hutchinson and Rawlins, the development of systems of hierarchical dominance within animal societies does not correspond to any practical necessity, nor to any selective advantage; it simply constitutes a means of combating the crushing boredom of life in the heart of nature.
Michel Houellebecq / Author
Crush
Heart
Mean
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Michel Houellebecq Quotes - Page 2

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