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What would it be like when I was fifty, sixty, older? I'd be no more than a jumble of organs in slow decomposition. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Some people live to be seventy, sometimes eighty years old believing there is always something new just around the corner, as they say; in the end they practically have to be killed or at least reduced to a state of serious incapacity to get them to see reason. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Polemical debates happen all the time in France. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The transition to a salaried workforce had doomed the nuclear family and led to the complete atomization of society, -- Michel Houellebecq
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It's submission," Rediger murmured. "The shocking and simple idea, which had never been so forcefully expressed, that the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The triumph of vegetation is total. -- Michel Houellebecq
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If you control the children, you control the future. -- Michel Houellebecq
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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
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People are suspicious of single men on vacation, after they get to a certain age: they assume that they're selfish, and probably a bit pervy. I can't say they're wrong. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Talking to morons like that is like pissing in a urinal full of cigarette butts, like shitting in a toilet full of Tampax: nothing gets flushed, and everything starts to stink. -- Michel Houellebecq
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To maintain order in your bureaucratic life, you more or less have to stay home; go away for any length of time and you're always likely to run afoul of some agency or other. -- Michel Houellebecq
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What could we do, then? We asked ourselves the question while crossing the dunes. Live? It's precisely in this kind of situation that, crushed by the sense of their own insignificance, people decide to have children; this is how the species reproduces, although less and less, it must be said. -- Michel Houellebecq
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There was no way I could think it over without a second Calvados. After thinking it over, I decided that the really prudent thing was to go out and buy another bottle. -- Michel Houellebecq
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To give a man 5 sous because he is poor and has no bread is perfect, but to give him a blowjob because he has no girlfriend is too much of a good thing: you don't have to do that. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Writing brings scant relief. It retraces, it delimits. It lends a touch of coherence, the idea of a kind of realism. One stumbles around in a cruel fog, but there is the odd pointer. Chaos is no more than a few feet away. A meagre victory, in truth. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our compassion between two infinities of happiness and peace. -- Michel Houellebecq
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While I was waiting to die, I still had the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Studies. -- Michel Houellebecq
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In the presence of a reader of Teilhard De Chardin I feel disarmed, nonplussed, ready to break down in tears. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The Sushi Warehouse in Roissy 2E offered an exceptional range of Norwegian mineral waters. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The dream of all men is to meet little sluts who are innocent but ready for all forms of depravity - which is what, more or less, all teenage girls are. -- Michel Houellebecq
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You can't be a crazy rebel in the face of death, it's not a fitting attitude. -- Michel Houellebecq
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On beach holidays, as perhaps in life more generally, the only truly enjoyable time of the day is breakfast. -- Michel Houellebecq
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I tend to think that good and evil exist and that the quantity in each of us is unchangeable. The moral character of people is set, fixed until death. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Or maybe I was just hungry. I'd forgotten to eat the day before, and possibly what I should do was go back to my hotel and sit down to a few duck's legs instead of falling down between the pews in an attack of mystical hypoglycemia. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Women are not stupid, but they were not clever enough to realise that feminism did not bring freedom, but the opposite. That's why I'm glad feminism is dead. -- Michel Houellebecq
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DURING THE FIRST PART of your life, you only become aware of happiness once you have lost it. Then an age comes, a second one, in which you already know, at the moment when you begin to experience true happiness, that you are, at the end of the day, going to lose it. -- Michel Houellebecq
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It wasn't easy to cram your whole life into thirty kilos of luggage. -- Michel Houellebecq
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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
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All I knew was that once again I found myself alone, with even less desire to live and nothing to look forward to but aggravations. -- Michel Houellebecq
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To love a book is, above all, to love its author: we want to meet him again, we want to spend our days with him. -- Michel Houellebecq
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It's perfectly possible to live without expecting anything of life; in fact, it's the most common way. -- Michel Houellebecq
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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
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We turn our eyes to the heavens, and the heavens are empty. -- Michel Houellebecq
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To increase desires to an unbearable level whilst making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based. -- Michel Houellebecq
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You know, you don't have to have permanent opinions. You can think, every morning, 'I love the world' and go to bed every night thinking, 'I hate the world.' -- Michel Houellebecq
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Western nations took a strange pride in this system, though it amounted to little more than a power-sharing deal between two rival gangs, and they would even go to war to impose it on nations that failed to share their enthusiasm. Over -- Michel Houellebecq
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When men have no vices, she thought, it's very difficult to guess what might make them happy. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Father died last year. I don't subscribe to the theory by which we only become truly adult when our parents die; we never become truly adult. -- Michel Houellebecq
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I wondered what could interest me, now that I was finished with love. -- Michel Houellebecq
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For the French, an intellectual didn't have to be responsible. That wasn't his job. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Undoubtedly, the best way for a consumer to have a good time in the 2010s was to turn to Korean products: for a car, Kia and Hyundai; for electronics, LG and Samsung. -- Michel Houellebecq
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It may well be impossible for people who have lived and prospered under a given social system to imagine the point of view of those who feel it offers them nothing, and who can contemplate its destruction without any particular dismay. -- Michel Houellebecq
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That if a civil war should break out in France, it would take a while to reach the south-west. I knew next to nothing about the south-west, really, only that it was a region where they ate duck confit, and duck confit struck me as incompatible with civil war. -- Michel Houellebecq
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A whore can always turn herself into a good little cook over time. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Bloy was the ultimate weapon against the twentieth century, its mediocrity, its moronic 'engagement,' its cloying humanitarianism; against Sartre, and Camus, and all their political playacting; and against all those sickening formalists, the nouveau roman, the pointless absurdity of it all. -- Michel Houellebecq
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People cannot live without God; life becomes unbearable. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The love of a dog is a pure thing. He gives you a trust which is total. You must not betray it. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Using a big word like 'plagiarism' ... always causes some damage. It will always do lasting damage, like accusations of racism. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Two years before, when the riots started, the media had had a field day, but now people discussed them less and less ... in fact the media's attitude had changed over the last few months. No one talked about violence in the banlieues or race riots anymore. That was all passed over in silence. -- Michel Houellebecq
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For men, love is nothing more than gratitude for the gift of pleasure, -- Michel Houellebecq
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Not having anything around to read is dangerous: you have to content yourself with life itself, and that can lead you to take risks. -- Michel Houellebecq
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After my baccalaureate, I signed up for acting lessons; there followed some inglorious years, during which I grew nastier and nastier and, as a consequence, more and more caustic; thanks to this, success finally arrived - on a scale that surprised me. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Should I just die? The decision struck me as premature. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Thirty years later, Bruno was convinced that, taken in context, the episode could be summed up in one sentence: Caroline Yessayan's miniskirt was to blame for everything. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Were they ready to give up everything for their country? I felt ready to give up everything, not really for my country, but in general. -- Michel Houellebecq
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It will all be much easier for the conservatives, who are in even worse shape, and who never cared about education - they hardly even know what education is. -- Michel Houellebecq
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He doesn't know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is brief. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The putting to death of morality had, on the whole, become a sort of ritual sacrifice necessary for the reassertion of the dominant values of the group - centered for some decades now on competition, innovation, and energy, more than on fidelity and duty. -- Michel Houellebecq
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I was about as political as a bath towel. -- Michel Houellebecq
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I was as political as a bath towel -- Michel Houellebecq
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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
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There is no point in asking me general questions because I am always changing my mind. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Living together aklone is hell between consenting adults. -- Michel Houellebecq
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It's a curious idea to reproduce when you don't even like life. -- Michel Houellebecq
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I don't like this world. I definitely do not like it. The society in which I live disgusts
me; advertising sickens me; computers make me puke. -- Michel Houellebecq
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If life is an illusion it's a pretty painful one. -- Michel Houellebecq
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In my own writing, I think of myself as a realist who exaggerates a little. -- Michel Houellebecq
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For the first time in my life I'd started thinking about God, seriously imagining that there could be a kind of Creator of the universe observing everything I did, and my first reaction was uncomplicated, pure and simple fear. -- Michel Houellebecq
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It was amazing, even, to think that the only thing left to people in their despair was reading. -- Michel Houellebecq
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I prefer reading to writing. Reading changes your world view. Writing changes absolutely nothing. Except, of course, when it makes you rich. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Only literature can grant you access to a spirit from beyond the grave - a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you'd have in conversation with a friend. -- Michel Houellebecq
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But it remains the case that, on the level of consumption, the preeminence of the twentieth century was indisputable: nothing. -- Michel Houellebecq
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In any case, it wouldn't affect the results at all, but that phrase the balance of power always sounds impressive in conversation, as if you'd been reading Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. I -- Michel Houellebecq
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Nostalgia has nothing to do with aesthetics, it's not even connected to happy memories. We feel nostalgia for a place simply because we've lived there; whether we lived well or badly scarcely matters. -- Michel Houellebecq
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I'd say that the question whether love still exists plays the same role in my novels as the question of God's existence in Dostoevsky. -- Michel Houellebecq
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A woman is human, obviously, but she represents a slightly different kind of humanity. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Jesus had loved men too much, that was the problem; to let himself be crucified for their sake showed, at the very least, a lack of taste, as the old faggot would have put it. -- Michel Houellebecq
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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
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In that time he had managed to write books that made me consider him a friend more than a hundred years later. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The truth is that men were simply giving up the ghost. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Literature has always carried positive connotations in the world of luxury goods. -- Michel Houellebecq
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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
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I maintained a tactical silence. When you maintain a tactical silence and look people right in the eye, as if drinking in their words, they talk. People like to be listened to, as every researcher knows
every researcher, every writer, every spy. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Love binds, and it binds forever. Good binds while evil unravels. Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit. -- Michel Houellebecq
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I'd feel kind of like a rat abandoning ship." "Rats are intelligent mammals," he answered calmly, almost with amusement. "They will probably outlive us. Their society, at any rate, is a good deal more stable than ours. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The physical bodies of young people, the only desirable possession the world has ever produced, were reserved for the exclusive use of the young, and the fate of the old was to work and to suffer. -- Michel Houellebecq
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What the boy felt was something pure, something gentle, something that predates sex or sensual fulfillment. It was the simple desire to reach out and touch a loving body, to be held in loving arms. Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so difficult to give up hope. -- Michel Houellebecq
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I am for the muscles. I would like to have a lot of muscles, because women like it. I'm for bodybuilding, but it's very exhausting. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The feeling of closeness when we talked on the phone was too violent, and the void that came afterward too cruel. -- Michel Houellebecq
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We are probably wrong to suspect that each individual has some secret passion, some mystery, some weakness; if Jean-Yves's father had had to express his innermost convictions, the profound meaning he ascribed to life, he could probably have cited nothing more than a slight disappointment. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Obstinacy is perhaps the only human quality that matters at the end of the day, not only in the profession of the policeman but in many professions. At least in any that have something to do with the notion of truth. -- Michel Houellebecq
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I think that if I am notorious, it is because other people have decided that this is how I should be. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Anything can happen in life, especially nothing. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The world outside had its own rules, and those rules were not human. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Active people don't change the world profoundly; ideas do. Napoleon is less important in world history than Jean-Jacques Rousseau. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Why am I popular? I don't know. Is it a mistake? I should think it's a mistake somewhere. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The greater the proportion of pure morality in a particular system, the happier and more enduring the society. -- Michel Houellebecq
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the word humanism made me want to vomit, -- Michel Houellebecq
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What about you, Michel, what are you going to do here?'
The response closest to the truth was probably something like 'Nothing'; but it's always difficult to explain that kind of thing to an active person. -- Michel Houellebecq
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That hole she had at the base of her belly must appear so useless to her; a prick can always be cut off, but how do you forget the emptiness of a vagina? -- Michel Houellebecq
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Life begins at fifty, that's true, inasmuch as it ends at forty. -- Michel Houellebecq
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You have to take an interest in something in life, I told myself. I wondered what could interest me, after I was finished with love. I could take a course in wine tasting, maybe , or start collecting model aeroplanes -- Michel Houellebecq
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What little private tutoring I'd done, to raise my standard of living, soon convinced me that the transmission of knowledge was generally impossible, the variance of intelligence extreme, and that nothing could undo or even mitigate this basic inequality. -- Michel Houellebecq
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All in all, I was harking back to the Ancient Greeks. When you get old, you always hark back to the Ancient Greeks. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The French Revolution, the republic, the motherland ... yes, all that paved the way for something, something that lasted a little more than a century. The Christian Middle Ages lasted a millennium and more. -- Michel Houellebecq
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I didn't even want to fuck her, or maybe I kind of wanted to fuck her but I also kind of wanted to die, I couldn't really tell. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Beds last on an average much longer than marriages ... -- Michel Houellebecq
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His masterpiece was a dead end - but isn't that true of any masterpiece? -- Michel Houellebecq
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If they can read in the eyes of a man an energy, a passion, then they find him attractive. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The Enlightened One, if he had meditated on it, would not necessarily have rejected a technical solution. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Even in our deepest, most lasting friendships, we never speak as openly as when we face a blank page and address a reader we do not know. -- Michel Houellebecq
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As I got older, I also found myself agreeing more with Nietzsche, as is no doubt inevitable once your plumbing starts to fail. -- Michel Houellebecq
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When a country is strong ... it accepts any dose of pessimism from its writers. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Those who think they know me are simply lacking in information. -- Michel Houellebecq
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When you read the Koran, you give up. At least the Bible is very beautiful because Jews have an extraordinary literary talent. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit. All that exists is a magnificent interweaving, vast and reciprocal. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Now abideth beauty, truth, and intensity; but the greatest of these is intensity. -- Michel Houellebecq
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In my life, I had known suffering, oppression, anxiety; I had never known boredom. I could see no objection to the endless, imbecile repetition of sameness. -- Michel Houellebecq
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My novels are all ideas. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Happy are those who are satisfied by life, who amuse themselves, who are content. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The story of a life can be as long or as short as the teller wishes. Whether the life is tragic or enlightened, the classic gravestone inscription marking simply the dates of birth and death has, in its brevity, much to recommend it. -- Michel Houellebecq
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If the fluidification of forms of behavior required by a developed economy was incompatible with a normative catalog of restrained conduct, it was, however, perfectly suited to a perpetual celebration of the will and the ego. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Through all the years of my sad youth Huysmans remained a companion, a faithful friend; never once did I doubt him, -- Michel Houellebecq
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There is no endless silence of infinite space, for in reality there is no space, no silence and no void. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Unhappiness isn't at its most acute point until a realistic chance of happiness, sufficiently close, has been envisioned. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. -- Michel Houellebecq
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What's amazing about Bayrou, what makes him irreplaceable," Tanneur enthused, "is that he's an utter moron. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Youth, beauty, strenght: the criteria for physical lova are exactly the same as those of Nazism. -- Michel Houellebecq
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As a teenager, Michel believed that suffering conferred dignity on a person. Now he had to admit that he had been wrong. What conferred dignity on people was television. -- Michel Houellebecq
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It's hard to understand other people, to know what's hidden in their hearts, and without the assistance of alcohol it might never be done at all. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The most stupid religion is Islam. -- Michel Houellebecq
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No doubt the Romans had felt that theirs was an eternal civilization, right up to the moment their empire fell apart. Were they suicides, too? -- Michel Houellebecq
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the tables were taken by law students talking about rave parties or 'junior associates', in other words, those things which interest law students -- Michel Houellebecq
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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. -- Michel Houellebecq
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(liberal individualism triumphed as long as it undermined intermediate structures such as nations, corporations, castes, but when it attacked that ultimate social structure, the family, and thus the birthrate, it signed its own death warrant; Muslim dominance was a foregone conclusion). -- Michel Houellebecq
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Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don't care to know any more. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The sun shone on the meadows and woods like a trusted employee. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Rumor had it that he was homosexual; in reality, in recent years, he was simply a garden-variety alcoholic. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so hard to give up hope. -- Michel Houellebecq
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When you got right down to it, my dick was the one organ that hadn't presented itself to my consciousness through pain, -- Michel Houellebecq
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I think that if writers don't speak about real life, it's because they don't know it. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The only conclusion he could draw was that without points of reference, a man melts away. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Islam is a dangerous religion. -- Michel Houellebecq
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I think poetry is the only domain where a writer you like can truly be said to influence you, because you read and reread a poem so many times that it simply drills itself into your head. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Men live alongside one another like cattle; it is a miracle if once in a while they manage to share a bottle of booze. -- Michel Houellebecq
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That old queer Nietzsche had it right: Christianity was, at the end of the day, a feminine religion. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Maybe I should have gone into politics. If you were a political activist, election season brought moments of intensity, whichever side you were on, and meanwhile here I was inarguably withering away, -- Michel Houellebecq
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It only confirmed what I'd always thought - that for all their education university professors can't even imagine political developments having any effect on their careers : they consider themselves untouchable. -- Michel Houellebecq
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I continued to wonder what exactly I had done to deserve a woman like Valerie. Nothing, probably. I observe the world as it unfurls, I thought; proceeding empirically, in good faith, I observe it; I can do no more than observe. -- Michel Houellebecq
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People don't really care all that much about their own death. What they really worry about, their one real fixation, is how to avoid physical suffering as much as possible. -- Michel Houellebecq
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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
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The floor was strewn with various animal skins - mainly sheep, I'd guess. It was kind of like being in a German porn flick from the seventies, set in a Tyrolean hunting lodge. -- Michel Houellebecq
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In the end, my cock was all I had. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The map is more interesting than the territory. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know, -- Michel Houellebecq
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The mere will to live was clearly no match for the pains and aggravations that punctuate the life of the average Western man. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The beach at Meschers was crawling with wankers in shorts and bimbos in thongs. It was reassuring. -- Michel Houellebecq
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In reality, the monotheist texts preach neither peace, love nor tolerance. They are texts of hate. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The press may hate me, and I know my battles with them are not over, but that doesn't matter. -- Michel Houellebecq
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In all of human history there may never have been a mind as brilliant as Isaac Newton's - just think what an amazing, unheard-of intellectual effort it took to discover a single law that accounted for the fall of earthly bodies and the movement of the planets! Well, Newton believed in God. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Intimacy isn't something men talk about. -- Michel Houellebecq
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As soon as the genome had been cmpletely decoded (which would be in a matter of months) humanity would have complete control of its evolution; when that happened sexuality would be seen for what it really was: a useless, dangerous, and regressive function. -- Michel Houellebecq
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The Americans are completely stupid. The intellectual level in any single European country is higher than in America. -- Michel Houellebecq
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There is no Israel for me. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Yet the special thing about literature, the major art form of a Western civilization now ending before our very eyes, is not hard to define. -- Michel Houellebecq
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These immigrants held out the hope of a new golden age for the old continent. -- Michel Houellebecq
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In order to pass the time I told him the story of the German who ate the other German whom he'd met on the internet. -- Michel Houellebecq
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Much, maybe too much, has been written about literature. -- Michel Houellebecq
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I want to be loved despite my faults. It isn't exactly true that I'm a provocateur. A real provocateur is someone who says things he doesn't think, just to shock. I try to say what I think. -- Michel Houellebecq
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I think it's more difficult to live without a religion, definitely. -- Michel Houellebecq
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an intellectual didn't have to be responsible. That wasn't his job. In -- Michel Houellebecq