Pascal Mercier quotes

But when we set out to understand somebody's inside? Is that a trip that ever ends? Is the soul a place of facts? Or are the alleged facts only the deceptive shadows of our stories? (Pascal Mercier)
We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.
Pascal Mercier
Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us -- what happens with the rest?
Pascal Mercier
We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place. We stay there even though we go away and there are things in us we can find again only by going back there. We travel to ourselves when we go to a place. We have covered a stretch of our life no matter how brief it may have been but by traveling to ourselves we must confront our own loneliness. And isn't it so that everything we do is done out of fear of our loneliness? Isn't that why we renounce all the things we will regret at the end of our life?
Pascal Mercier
We live here and now. Everything before and in other places is past. Mostly forgotten. What could, what should be done with all the time that lies ahead of us, open and unshaped, feather-light in its freedom and lead-heavy in its uncertainty? Is it a wish? Dream-like and nostalgic, to stand once again at that point in life and be able to take a completely different direction than the one that has made us who we are?
Pascal Mercier
When dictatorship is a fact, revolution is a duty!
Pascal Mercier
Life is not what we live; it is what we imagine we are living.
Pascal Mercier
It wasn't only that you didn't see him anymore, meet him anymore. You saw his absence and encountered it as something tangible. His not being there was like the sharply outlined emptiness of a photo with a figure cut out precisely with scissors and now the missing figure is more important, more dominant than all others.
Pascal Mercier
A feeling is no longer the same when it comes the second time. It dies through the awareness of its return. We become tired and weary of our feelings when they come too often and last too long.
Pascal Mercier
So, the fear of death might be described as the fear of not being able to become whom one had planned to be.
Pascal Mercier
To understand yourself: Is that a discovery or a creation? (Pascal Mercier)
In the years afterward, I fled whenever somebody began to understand me. That has subsided. But one thing remained: I don't want anybody to understand me completely. I want to go through life unknown. The blindness of others is my safety and my freedom.
Pascal Mercier
That words could cause something in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or cry: even as a child he had found it extraordinary and it never stopped impressing him. How did words do that? Wasn't it like magic?
Pascal Mercier
I am still there, at that distant place in time, I never left it, but live expanded in the past, or out of it.
Pascal Mercier
I love tunnels. They 're the symbol of hope: sometime it will be bright again. If by chance it is not night.
Pascal Mercier
Isn't it true that it's not people who meet, but rather the shadows cast by their imaginations?
Pascal Mercier
Sometimes, we are afraid of something because we're afraid of something else.
Pascal Mercier
Kitsch is the most pernicious of all prisons. The bars are covered with the gold of simplistic, unreal feelings, so that you take them for the pillars of a palace.
Pascal Mercier
[Vanity] is an unrecognised form of stupidity, you have to forget the cosmic meaninglessness of all our acts to be able to be vain and that's a glaring form of stupidity.
Pascal Mercier
What is it that we call loneliness. It can't simply be the absence of others, you can be alone and not lonely, and you can be among people and yet be lonely. So what is it?
Pascal Mercier
What did i know of your fantasies? Why do we know so little about the fantasies of our parents? What do we know of somebody if we know nothing of the images passed to him by his imagination? (Pascal Mercier)
Our lives are rivers, gliding free to that unfathomed, boundless sea, the silent grave!
Pascal Mercier
To live for the moment: it sounds so right and so beautiful. But the more I want to, the less I understand what it means.
Pascal Mercier
It is not the pain and the wounds that are the worst. The worst is the humiliation.
Pascal Mercier
We are stratified creatures, creatures full of abysses, with a soul of inconstant quicksilver, with a mind whose color and shape change as in a kaleidoscope that is constantly shaken.
Pascal Mercier