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Romain Gary

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“My hints had, undoubtedly and unintentionally, made her feel insecure, guilty, inadequate, afraid that she was losing whatever it was that turned me on; in short, it aroused all the self-doubt so readily awakened in women after thousands of years of servitude. Hence my zeal in denying the effects of time was abetted by Laura's complicity.”

DeclineImpotenceSelf DoubtWomen And MenSexual IntercourseMen S HealthOlder Man Younger Girl
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“The whole of his life was only one long protest against his lack of importance: that, I’m sure, was what drove him to kill so many magnificent animals — some of the finest and most powerful in creation. One day, I won the confidence of a writer who comes regularly to Africa to kill his ration of elephants, lions and rhino. I had asked him where he got this need and he had had enough to drink to make him sincere: ‘All my life I’ve been half-dead with fear. Fear of living, fear of dying, fear of illness, fear of becoming impotent, fear of the inevitable physical decline. When it becomes intolerable, I come to Africa, and all my dread, all my fear, is concentrated on the charging rhino, on the lion rising slowly in front of me out of the grass, on the elephant that swerves in my direction. Then at last my dread becomes something tangible, something I can kill. I shoot, and for a while I’m delivered, I have complete peace, the animal has taken away with him in his sudden death all my accumulated terrors — for a few hours I’m rid of them. At the end of six weeks it amounts to a real cure.’ I’m sure there was something of that in Orsini — but above all, there was a violent protest against the smallness and impotence of being a man, the smallness and impotence of being Orsini. He had to kill a lot of elephants and lions to compensate for that.”

ViolenceFearfulUnimportantImpotenceSmall MindsSmall ManScared Of BeingSmall MenDreading Exericse
Author:Romain Gary
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“Not that I had any intention of accosting him to propose any practical agreement. That would have demanded on Laura's part a degree of devotion, of understanding, a detached view of the purely animal act of love, such as could not be expected of so young a woman who was so subject conventions of comportment in a society that had always shown itself incapable of differentiating between love and sexuality.”

LoveSexualityOppressionDeclineImpotenceWomen And MenOlder Man Younger Girl
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“Abe Fields, in spite of his fever, felt pride in being a realistic American with the highest national income per head of population in the world, and the most comfortable standard of living since the beginning of evolution; the reptiles of the primeval sea could be proud of America, and the ancestor who had first crawled of his native mud, in a desperate effort to become a man, might now sleep in peace— he had succeeded. His name should be venerated in every American school; he was the real pioneer, the father of free enterprise, of the spirit of initiative, of all those who dared, who risked, of all that had led to the stupendous material progress of the United States.”

EvolutionAmerican DreamAmerican HistoryAmerican CultureAmerican SocietyNational PrideEvolutionary Process
Book:The Roots of Heaven
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“finalement, éperdu d'amour et au comble de la frénésie érotique, je m'assis dans l'herbe et j'enlevai un de mes souliers en caoutchouc. — Je vais le manger pour toi, si tu veux. Si elle le voulait I Ha! Mais bien sûr qu'elle le voulait, voyons! C'était une vraie petite femme. --- Elle posa son cerceau par terre et s'assit sur ses ta-lons. Je crus voir dans ses yeux une lueur d'estime. Je n'en demandais pas plus. Je pris mon canif et enta-mai le caoutchouc. Elle me regardait faire. — Tu vas le manger cru ? — Oui. J'avalai un morceau, puis un autre. Sous son regard enfin admiratif, je me sentais devenir vraiment un homme. Et j'avais raison. Je venais de faire mon apprentissage. J'entamai le caoutchouc encore plus profondément, soufflant un peu, entre les bouchées, et je continuai ainsi un bon moment, jusqu'à ce qu'une sueur froide me montât au front. Je continuai même un peu au-delà, serrant les dents, luttant contre la nausée, ramassant toutes mes forces pour demeurer sur le terrain, comme il me fallut le faire tant de fois, depuis, dans mon métier d'homme. Je fus très malade, on me transporta à l'hôpital, ma mère sanglotait, Aniela hurlait, les filles de l'atelier geignaient, pendant qu'on me mettait sur un brancard dans l'ambulance. J'étais très fier de moi. Mon amour d'enfant m'inspira vingt ans plus tard mon premier roman Éducation européenne, et aussi certains passages du Grand Vestiaire. Pendant longtemps, à travers mes pérégrinations, j'ai transporté avec moi un soulier d'enfant en caoutchouc, entamé au couteau. J'avais vingt-cinq ans, puis trente, puis quarante, mais le soulier était toujours là, à portée de la main. J'étais toujours prêt à m'y attabler, à donner, une fois de plus, le meilleur de moi-même. Ça ne s'est pas trouvé. Finalement, j'ai abandonné le soulier quelque part derrière moi. On ne vit pas deux fois. (La promesse de l'aube, ch. XI)”

Indigestion
Book:Promise at Dawn
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“This outlook is what it is — for better, for worse. I suppose I shall make everyone smile if I say that we were brought up to take our place in a world of gentlemen. We knew, of course, that there was the risk of sometimes being hit below the belt, but we were brought up in the belief that the blow below the belt was outside the law. The idea had never entered our heads that the blow below the belt might be the law, that that was how the game of life was played. You can, if you like, consider me an out-of-date old fool, but men of my kind simply never come in contact with the sort of circumstances that can produce a Morel or a Minna.”

GentlemanBarbariansGentlemen
Book:The Roots of Heaven
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“The idea that a professional tracker like Idriss could suddenly start suffering from a sort of poetic remorse, soulfulness, regret at the memory of the animals he had tracked down— such an idea could only come to birth in decadent brains and exquisite sensitivities freshly arrived from Europe — which were the beginning of all our troubles in Africa and elsewhere, be it said in passing.”

BarbariansWestern CivilizationWestern CultureWesternizationWestern Influence
Book:The Roots of Heaven
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“What progress requires inexorably of human beings and of continents is that they should renounce their strangeness, that they should break with mystery; and somewhere along that road is inscribed inexorably the end of the last elephant. The cultivated lands must encroach upon the forests, and the roads will bite more and more deeply into the quietude of the great herds. There will be less and less room for natural splendor. A pity.”

ProgressHuman CivilizationCivilization Vs NatureCivilizational Decline
Book:The Roots of Heaven
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“You know why? Because I thought you were different from us. Yes, I thought you were something special, something different on this sad earth of ours. I wanted to escape with you from the white man’s hollow materialism, from his lack of faith, his humble and frustrated sexuality, from his lack of joy, of laughter, of magic, of faith in the richness of after-life. In fact, I wanted to escape from everything you’re learning from us so quickly, from all the things people like you, Monsieur le depute, are daily injecting into the black man’s soul. Soon there’ll be no Africa left: people like you, Monsieur le depute, for all their talk of national independence, will deliver Africa to the West forever. You’ll, accomplish that final conquest for us. Of course, to achieve that, people like you will have to exercise a tyranny and a cruelty compared to which colonialism will soon appear as child’s play — and in the name of Marx and Stalin, you'll accomplish that conquest for us. For it is our fetishes, our pagan gods, our prejudices, our racism, our nationalism, our poisons that you dream of injecting into the African blood. . . . We’ve never yet dared to do it, but under the name of progress and nationalism, you’ll do the job for us. You’re our most rewarding fifth column. Naturally, we don’t understand this: we’re too stupid. We’re trying to fight you, to destroy you, to prevent you from delivering Africa to us forever.”

NationalismIndustrializationLoss Of IdentityWesternizationDecline Of CivilizationDecline Of The West
Book:The Roots of Heaven
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“She knew that Fort Lamy was a long way away, on the other side of the Sahara, in the middle of Africa — another world. Another world — and that was exactly what she needed. There at last she would be able to satisfy her need for warmth — even at Tunis there were moments when the cold was more than she could take.”

ColdnessCold DaysWarm WeatherHealing WoundsNeed For HealingHealing With NatureWarmth And Light Of The Sun
Book:The Roots of Heaven
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“To the white man the elephant had long meant merely ivory, and to the black man it always meant merely meat — the most abundant quantity of meat that a lucky hit with the assagai could procure for him. The idea of the 'beauty' of the elephant, of the 'nobility' of the elephant, was the idea of a man who had had enough to eat, a man of restaurants and of two meals a day and of museums of abstract art — an idea typical of a decadent society that takes refuge in abstractions from the ugly social realities it is incapable of facing, and makes itself drunk on vague and twilight notions of the beautiful, of the noble, of the fraternal, simply because the purely poetic attitude is the only one which history allows it to adopt. Bourgeois intellectuals insisted that a society on the march and in full spate should encumber itself with elephants simply because in that way they themselves hoped to escape destruction. They knew that they were just as anachronistic and cumbersome as these prehistoric animals; it was just a way of claiming mercy for themselves, of asking to be spared. Morel was typical of them. But to human beings in Africa, the elephant’s only beauty was the weight of his meat, and as for human dignity, that was first and foremost a full belly. Perhaps, when the African does have his belly full, perhaps then he too will take an interest in the beauty of the elephant and will in general give himself up to agreeable meditations on the splendors of nature. For the moment, nature spoke to him of splitting the elephant’s belly open and plunging his teeth into it and eating, eating till he dropped, because he did not know where the next morsel would come from.”

Truth Of LifeAfrican Philosophy QuotesIntellectualsWesternizationPoetic NarrativeWestern Ideals
Book:The Roots of Heaven
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“Racism is when it doesn't count. When they don't count. When one can do anything with them, it doesn't matter what , because they are not people like us. Do you see? Not our kind. When we can make use of them as we please, without losing face, dignity, honor. Without embarrassment, without making a moral judgement - that's it. When we can make them do no matter what degrading work, service, because their opinion of us doesn't count, because it cannot tarnish us. That's what racism is.”

RacismNeglectDisrespectRacism And CultureRacist People
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“The majority of the foreign workers who lived here were Mohammedans, still deeply traditionalist in their attitude toward the female body, and who tended to regard her revealing outfit as either an impertinence or an invitation. [...] — We're insulting them. We're behaving like racists. Walking around here like a pair of voyeurs, like visitors to a zoo... [...] — I simply don't understand. — Can you see how they are looking at you? — No. Besides, it's you they are looking at, more than me. — That's it exactly. It's their way. — Their way of what? Would you explain to me, for the love of heaven, what's going on here? What's bothering you? I stopped short. — Don't you know what racism is? — But... — Racism is when it doesn't count. When they don't count. When one can do anything with them, it doesn't matter what , because they are not people like us. Do you see? Not our kind. When we can make use of them as we please, without losing face, dignity, honor. Without embarrassment, without making a moral judgement - that's it. When we can make them do no matter what degrading work, service, because their opinion of us doesn't count, because it cannot tarnish us. That's what racism is.”

RacismNeglectDisrespectRacism And Culture
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“Your generation is suffering from what for lack of a better word I shall call over-debunk. There was a lot of debunking that had to be done, of course. Bigotry, militarism, nationalism, religious intolerance, hypocrisy, phonyness, all sorts of dangerous, ready-made, artificially preserved false values. But your generation and the generation before yours went too far with their debunking job. You went overboard. Over-debunk, that's what you did. It's moral overkill. It's like those insecticides Rachel Carson speaks of in her book, that poison everything, and kill all the nice, useful bugs as well as the bad ones, and in the end poison human beings as well. In the end, it poisons life itself, the very air we breathe. That's what you did, morally and intellectually speaking. Yours is a silent spring. You have overprotected yourselves. You are all no more than twenty, twenty-two years old, but yours is a silent spring, I'm telling you. Nothing sings for you any more.”

WeltschmerzBaby BoomersMoral Overkill
Book:خداحافظ گاری کوپر
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“Je suis en train de me dire que le problème noir aux États-Unis pose une question qui le rend pratiquement insoluble: celui de la Bêtise. Il a ses racines dans les profondeurs de la plus grande puissance spirituelle de tous les temps, qui est la Connerie. Jamais, dans l'histoire, l'intelligence n'est arrivée à résoudre des problèmes humains lorsque leur nature essentielle est celle de la Bêtise. Elle est arrivée à les contourner, à s'arranger avec eux par l'habileté ou par la force, mais neuf fois sur dix, lorsque l'intellidence croyait déjà en sa victoire, elle a vu surgir en son milieu toute la puissance de la Bêtise immortelle. Il suffit de voir ce que la Bêtise a fait des victoires du communisme, par exemple, du déferlement des spermatzoïdes de la « révolution culturelle », ou au moment où j’ecrIs, de l’assassinat du « printemps de Prague » au nom de la « pensée marxiste correcte ». (Chien blanc)”

RacismeConnerieBêtise
Author:Romain Gary
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“یک ضرب المثل فرانسوی را خوب به خاطر داشت که میگفت :کسی که خوب دوست دارد ، خوب هم تنبیه می کند. هدف هنر نجات جهان نیست . بلکه آن است که دنیا را پذیرفتنی تر کند. _ اما نباید به ناممکن دست زد_ این یک ضرب المثل قدیمی فرانسوی بود و آنت آن را خوب میدانست . برای اولین بار فهمید که شاید عشق، بزرگ ترین نوع بندگی باشد ، و برای رهایی از قید آن آدم باید خراب کار شود و علیه استبدادش بجنگد . آمیختن جذابیت جسمی با عشق روحی ، مثل مخلوط کردن سیاست با ایده آلیسم است. کار خیلی بدی است. همانطور که تمام انقلابیون و فلاسفه به ما یاد می دهند ، آزادی پر ارزش ترین چیز روی زمین است . تو نباید تمام عمرت اسیر عشق باشی.”

Romain GaryLady Lرومن گاری
Book:Lady L
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“The transformation of a gilded playboy into a multinational titan did not surprise me. Age does not affect the taste for trophies, and flagging physical vigor is often compensated for by a fresh psychological drive. [...] In his fifties, a man’s virility often goes into action to build up a capital of power as a shelter against glandular decline.”

AmbitionAgingMen S Health
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“He thought of all that the newspapers were printing about him. Each man attributed to him his own hopes, his own motives and rancors, and his own secret misanthropy: it was in vain that he stated his own aims clearly; there was nothing he could do about it. And yet the truth was clear; it could hardly be clearer. He loved all those free roots that gave their beauty to the earth and to man’s life on it. He loved nature, and he had always done his best to defend it.”

DreamsHopesPlantingLove For HumanityLove For LifeLove For NatureLove For The WorldMisantropy
Book:The Roots of Heaven
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“Suddenly Morel had felt something strike against his cheek and fall at his feet. He lowered his eyes cautiously, taking care not to lose his balance. It was a may-beetle. It had fallen on its back and was waving its legs, trying in vain to turn over. Morel stopped and stared fixedly at the insect at his feet. He had been at the camp a year, and for the last three weeks he had been carrying the sacks of cement for eight hours a day on an empty stomach. But this was something impossible to let pass. He bent his knee, keeping the sacks balanced on his shoulder, and with a movement of his forefinger placed the insect on its feet again. He did so twice more in the course of that journey. [...] From that moment practically all the political prisoners assisted the insects, while the common criminals passed by with curses. During the twenty minutes’ break they were allowed, not one of the political prisoners gave way to exhaustion, and yet that was when they usually threw themselves to the ground and lay without stirring till the next whistle. But this time they seemed to have found new strength. They wandered about with their eyes fixed on the ground in search of insects to help. It did not last long, of course. Sergeant Gruber arrived on the scene. [...] Immediately he had understood what was happening. He had recognized the enemy. He had known immediately that he was face to face with a scandalous provocation, an affirmation of unbroken spirit and faith, a proclamation of dignity, totally inadmissible in men reduced to zero.”

BelieveHumanityNever Give UpHuman SpiritSurvivorsHuman KindnessPrison CampsUnbroken Warrior
Book:The Roots of Heaven
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