Une vie
Guy de Maupassant
Top 10 Best Quotes
“One sometimes weeps over one's illusions with as much bitterness as over a death.”
“After all, life is never so jolly or so miserable as people seem to think.”
“Then she added, no doubt in answer to her own thoughts: 'You see, life is never as good or as bad as one thinks.' ”
“She hardly gave a thought to Julien; nothing in him surprised her any longer. But the double treachery of the Countess, her friend, disgusted her. Everyone in the world was a traitor, a liar, a deceiver, and tears came into her eyes. One sometimes weeps over one's illusions with as much bitterness as over a death.”
“But this pleasure was not unalloyed with pain, and it seemed as if the universal joy of the awakening world could now only impart a delight which was half sorrow to her grief-crushed soul and withered heart.”
“She [Aunt Lison] was a short, silent, unobtrusive woman, only appearing at meal-times and then retiring to her room, where she remained closeted all day. She had a friendly manner and was beginning to feel her age, though she was only forty-two. Her eyes were soft and sad and she had never counted for anything in the family. As a child no one had ever kissed her, for she was neither pretty nor noisy; she was like a shadow or some familiar object, a living piece of furniture that one sees every day without noticing it.”
“Human nature itself seemed to her obscene, when she thought of all the filthy secrets of sensuality, the degrading caresses, all the mysterious connexions that cannot be broken off, at which she guessed.”
“His generosity was his great strength and his great weakness; he had not enough hands to caress, to embrace, to give; it was the generosity of a creative power, without method and without toughness, which as it were sapped the muscles of his will and almost amounted to a vice.”
“As her figure coarsened, her soul became ever more romantic, and when her corpulence riveted her to her chair, her imagination continued to wander through tender adventures, of which she was the heroine.”
“A small lighted window at the end of the yard indicated the farmhouse. It seemed to Jeanne that her mind was expanding, was beginning to understand the psychic meaning of things; and these little scattered gleams in the landscape gave her, all at once, a keen sense of the isolation of all human lives, a feeling that everything detaches, separates, draws one far away from the things they love.”
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Book Keywords:
generosity, vice, life, obscene, unobtrusive, happiness, illusions, human-nature, aunt-lison, romantic, imagination, treachery, misery, realism
