the elegance of the hedgehog - Muriel Burbery

"If you imagine getting high at a party and sleeping around is going to propel you into a state of full adulthood, that's like thinking that dressing up as an indian is going to make you into an indian. It's a really weird way of looking at life to want to become an adult by imitating everything that is most catastrophic about adulthood."

"All happy families are alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"

"Life becomes a quiet stroll, whereas our life, in the homes we have, seems like nothing so much as a series of intrusions."

"You must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult."

"Looking at me with big and serious eyes, she asks, 'Do you believe in that life that has meaning?'"

‎"There's so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when we're surrounded by nature. Yes, thats it: just thinking about trees and their indifferent majesty and our love for them teaches us how ridiculous we are."

"Because beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuation of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death."

"But just by observing the adults around me, I understood very early on that life goes by in no time at all, yet they're always in such a hurry, so stressed out by deadlines, so eager for now that they needn't think about tomorrow. But if you dread tomorrow, its because you dont know how to build the present, and when you dont know how to build the present, you tell yourself you can deal with it tomorrow and its a lost cause anyways, because tomorrow always ends up becoming today."

"I'm afraid to go into myself and see what's going on in there. And I'm ashamed. I think I wanted to die and make Maman and Papa suffer because I had never really suffered. Or rather, I was suffering but it didn't hurt and, as a result all my little plans were just the luxury of some problem free teenager....For the first time in my life I understood the meaning of the word never. And it's really awful. You say the word a hundred times a day but you don't really know what you're saying until you're faced wiht a real "never again". Ultimately you always have the illusion that you're in control of what's happening; nothing seems definitive."

"True novelty is that which does not grow old despite the passage of time...The contemplation of eternity within the very moment of life."

"I have finally concluded, maybe that's what life is about: there's a lot of despair but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It's as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to use, an always within never....Beauty, in this world."

"There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired" -GREAT GATSBY