Platform Quotes
"People are suspicious of single men on holiday."
"Time, entropy, all that stuff, was slowly taking the place over."
"Father, father, I said to myself, how great was your vanity!"
"Their children are often there in the studio. You generally get the impression from the programme that these people are happy."
"Men live alongside one another like cattle; it is a miracle if once in a while they manage to share a bottle of booze."
"I valued happiness and continued to aspire to it."
"The contradictory trends of contemporary video art, balancing the conservation of national heritage with support for living creativity… all of that quickly evaporated before the facile magic of a moving pussy."
"Humanitarian Protestant cunts, that's what they were."
"A passionate letter-writer on occasion, St Jerome also knew how to display the virtues of Christian patience when circumstances called for it."
"In short, a lot of people copped it for very little."
"France was a sinister country, utterly sinister and bureaucratic."
"I've never really felt comfortable around men."
"I almost felt like taking her hand; for no particular reason, I didn't."
"Human groups of more than three people have a tendency, apparently, to split into two hostile sub-groups."
"What sort of large predators would there be in a jungle like that? Not many, probably —two or three leopards— but there was probably no shortage of snakes and spiders."
"I had become too remote from people, I had lived alone too long, I didn't know how to go about it any more."
"It's absolutely shameful that fat yobs can just come over here and take advantage of these girls' poverty with impunity."
"It's sexual slavery!" screamed Josiane. "There's no other way to describe it!"
"Nobody's forcing you to come with me, madam…" Robert replied calmly.
"Everyone can have what they desire, and everyone can have something good."
"In Thailand, everyone can have what they desire, and everyone can have something good."
"The proletariat of a previous generation, who had no hang-ups about enjoying modern comforts when they were available, proved to be much more resilient in truly uncomfortable circumstances than their offspring."
"The smile of the Buddha continued to float above the ruins."
"Life without anything to read is dangerous: you have to content yourself with life and that can lead you to take risks."
"It is in our relations with other people that we gain a sense of ourselves; it's that, pretty much, that makes relations with other people unbearable."
"I don't feel anything in particular, no rush of adrenalin. I am not remotely brave, I run away from danger if at all possible."
"We're all the same, we all head for the sun."
"On package tours, people don't talk about their professional lives much."
"It's pretty rare, in fact, people who take an interest in others."
"Life can be seen as a process of gradually coming to a standstill."
"Everything becomes too difficult: that's what life comes down to."
"Anything can happen in life, especially nothing."
"I felt slightly scared. I had managed, it seemed, to live for forty years without forming the most tenuous of attachments to a single object."
"She knew how to stop just before I came, she could have kept me on the brink for hours."
"I lived inside a game, a game which was tender and exciting, the only game left to adults."
"We remember our own lives, Schopenhauer wrote somewhere, a little better than a novel we once read."
"Human relationships aren't nearly as complicated as people make out: they're often insoluble but only rarely complicated."
"The idea of the uniqueness of the individual is nothing more than pompous absurdity."
"I'm not worried, we'll work out what's wrong… we're going to try and work out what's going wrong, why there's no atmosphere at the resort, why people don't come back thrilled from their holidays."
"The aim of tourist companies is to make people happy, for a specified price, for a specified period."
"A source of permanent, accessible pleasure, our genitals exist."
"If we couldn't have sex from time to time, what would life be?"
"The god who created our misfortune, who made us short-lived, vain and cruel, has also provided this form of meagre compensation."
"Sometimes, in the morning, everything seems simple."
"All humanity instinctively tends towards miscegenation, a generalised undifferentiated state, and it does so first and foremost through the elementary means of sexuality."
"The power of Nike, Adidas, Armani, Vuitton was, nonetheless, indisputable."
"Relationships between individuals in the West have become more difficult —a fact which, needless to say, we all deplore…"
"Not only did I not vote, but I had never considered elections as anything more than excellent television shows."
"The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die."
"Growing old is no joke; but growing old alone is worse than anything."
"The notion that I was in any way in solidarity with this environment had never occurred to me."
"In the beginning I could consciously prolong these without the slightest effort."
"I could see no objection to the endless, imbecile repetition of sameness."
"It's very difficult to leave Thailand; I know that if I had to do it now, it's something I'd find very hard to deal with."
"Life goes by effortlessly in an institution: there, for the most part, human needs are satisfied."
"The principal criteria for physical beauty are youth, absence of handicap and a general conformity to the norms of the species."