Book detail: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
The Alexandria Quartet is a series of four interconnected novels that delve into the lives of various characters in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. The books, titled 'Justine', 'Balthazar', 'Mountolive', and 'Clea', collectively form a rich tapestry of human emotions, political intrigue, and philosophical musings. The narrative spans several decades and intertwines the personal and the historical, offering a nuanced portrayal of the human condition.
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“Lovers can find nothing to say to each other that has not been said and unsaid a thousand times over. Kisses were invented to translate such nothings into wounds”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“The cocktail party - as the name itself indicates - was originally invented by dogs. They are simply bottom-sniffings raised to the rank of formal ceremonies.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“It is the duty of every patriot to hate his country creatively.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“Let us define 'man' as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“Religion is simply art bastardized out of all recognition.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“There is no pain compared to that of loving a woman who makes her body accessible to one and yet who is incapable of delivering her true self -- because she does not know where to find it.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their own kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“The effective in art is what rapes the emotions of your audience without nourishing its values.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“Gamblers and lovers really play to lose.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“Art like life is an open secret.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“I have been thinking about the girl I met last night in the mirror: dark on the marble-ivory white: glossy black hair: deep suspiring eyes in which one's glances sink because they are nervous, curious, turned to sexual curiosity.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might purprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“after all the work of the philosophers on his soul and the doctors on his body, what can we really say we know about a man? That he is, when all is said and done, just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper: or at least, not about love.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“He thought and suffered a good deal but he lacked the resolution to dare--the first requisite of a practitioner.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“I have decided to leave Clea’s last letter un-answered. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants. It will be up to Clea to interpret my silence according to her own needs and desires, to come to me if she has need or not, as the case may be. Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“Odd, isn't it? He really was the right man for her in a sort of way; but then as you know, it is a law of love that the so-called 'right' person always comes to soon or too late.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“I am just a refugee from the long slow toothache of English life. It is terrible to love life so much you can hardly breathe!”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“Love is like trench warfare - you cannot see the enemy, but you know he is there and that it is wiser to keep your head down.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors. All this may precede the first look, kiss, or touch; precede ambition, pride, or envy; precede the first declarations which mark the turning point—for from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“Shyness has laws you can only give yourself; tragically to those who least understand.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment: only there does its satisfaction lie.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“Very few people realise that sex is a psychic and not a physical act. The clumsy coupling of human beings is simply a biological paraphrase of this truth - a primitive method of introducing minds to each other, engaging them. But most people are stuck in the physical aspect, unaware of the poetic rapport which it so clumsily tries to teach.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“The memory of man is as old as misfortune”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“A city becomes a world when one loves one of its inhabitants.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential - the imagination.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“The artist's work constitutes the only satisfactory relationship he can have with his fellow men since he seeks his real friends among the dead and the unborn.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“Love joins and then divides. How else would we be growing?”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“Truth is a matter of direct apprehension-you can't climb a ladder of mental concepts to it.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“Truth is a woman. That is why it is enigmatic.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“Truth is what most contradicts itself.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea
“Of women, the most we can say, not being Frenchmen, is that they are burrowing animals.”
Source: The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea