Raymond Queneau Quotes

26 quotes in 346 categories

• Happy nations have no history. History is the study of mankind's misfortune.
• Being or nothing, that is the question. Ascending, descending, coming, going, a man does so much that in the end he disappears.
• True stories deal with hunger, imaginary ones with love.
• The poet is never inspired, because he is the master of that which appears to others as inspiration. He does not wait for inspiration to…
• When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses…
• Religions tend to disappear with man's good fortune.
• One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey.
• A very great Iliad... concerns the creation of a nation.
• It is the creator of fiction's point of view; it is the character who interests him. Sometimes he wants to convince the reader that the…
• Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in…
• The Iliad is the private lives of people thrown into disorder by history.
• All confessions are Odysseys.
• All societies are historical.
• It doesn't seem to me that anyone has discovered much that's new since the Iliad or the Odyssey.
• The Odyssey is the story of Americans up to the point where they are well-established, and even so it is detached from the historical side.
• The Odyssey is the story of someone who, in the course of diverse experiences, acquires a personality or affirms and recovers his personality.
• There have been only rare moments in history where individual histories were able to run their course without wars or revolutions.
• To have one's own story told by a third party who doesn't know that the character in question is himself the hero of the story…
• Ulysses finds himself unchanged, aside from his experience, at the end of his odyssey.
• We have gotten away from this double aspect of either putting the character back into historical events or of making a historical event of his…

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