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Romain Gary QUOTES

1 " ...the most sacred right of a person is to refuse o be manipulated, handled, cheated, and then kicked in the ass---. "

― Romain Gary , White Dog

2 " -I love you, Lenny.
-From the diaphragm.
-What are you talking about?
-You have to say it from the diaphragm. That's a muscle in here. Real deep, not from the throat. I tried to be an actor once and that's the first thing they told me. That's when I quit. I just didn't have that much in my diaphragm. "

― Romain Gary , خداحافظ گاری کوپر

3 " An unbearable reality, combined with the impossibility to change it, tends to lead to abstractions for abstraction's sake, and unreality becomes more realistic than reality itself, more true, more convincing, simply because it looks at you with the eyes of justice. "

― Romain Gary , White Dog

4 " Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality. "

― Romain Gary

5 " -Would you wish us to invest it for you?
-No, I would like you to set up a trust for dumb animals.
-What kind of dumb animals do you have in mind, Miss Donahue?
-Oh, stray dogs. Rats. Birds.
-We could still invest it for you. Then the animals would get the income without touching the capital.
-No, I don't wish to invest it. I don't want them to get rich. They might become human. "

― Romain Gary , خداحافظ گاری کوپر

6 " He gave up. He'd been feeling like giving up for a long, long time. I guess it's maturity, they say it always gets you in the end. I don't seem to have any more principles left, so it's got to be maturity... A broken man, I guess that's what you become, the moment you are no longer a kid. "

― Romain Gary , خداحافظ گاری کوپر

7 " Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him. "

― Romain Gary

8 " You see, deep in their hearts they’re convinced that a colonization that doesn't end in a seditious movement and massacres is not a successful colonization. Perhaps they’re right, in a way. "

― Romain Gary , The Roots of Heaven

9 " I experienced so intense a moment of despair, frustration and rebelliousness that irony, my most trusted weapon of defense, became instead another scalpel for probing my own wounds. "

― Romain Gary , Au-delà de cette limite votre ticket n'est plus valable

10 " The ability to laugh is what differentiates man from the beasts, but evidently one cannot always get oneself in a laughing mood. "

― Romain Gary

Romain Gary QUOTES

11 " I wondered — and I finally reached the conclusion that the Lebanese was a man who was in love with life, and that his carefree, enormous laugh— head thrown back, eyes closed in a grimace of mirth — celebrated a perfect, a total understanding between the two, an agreement which nothing ever managed to disturb: happiness, in fact. A beautiful affair: life and Habib were inseparable. "

― Romain Gary , The Roots of Heaven

12 " They died... Have you ever seen a baby elephant lying on its side, with its trunk inert, gazing at you with eyes in which there seem to have taken refuge all those so highly praised human qualities of which humanity is so largely devoid? "

― Romain Gary , The Roots of Heaven

13 " 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. "

― Romain Gary , Au-delà de cette limite votre ticket n'est plus valable

14 " At the moment we have unemployment, of course, and a shortage of orders, and tight credit, but those are only necessary phases of readjustment. Sometimes I wonder whether the Roman patricians didn't secretly long for the barbarians... And too, there are always those who mistake their own dilapidated condition for the decadence of a civilization. "

― Romain Gary

15 " 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. "

― Romain Gary , Au-delà de cette limite votre ticket n'est plus valable

16 " She must have said to herself that one can always rely on a gentleman when it’s a question of not understanding a woman. "

― Romain Gary , The Roots of Heaven

17 " 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. "

― Romain Gary , The Roots of Heaven

18 " Every official Organization for the Defense of Fauna and Flora had blacklisted him: his 'methods' were deplored and he was reproached also with having often been mixed up in political struggles. And that was true. The roots were innumerable, infinite in their variety and beauty, and some of them were deeply implanted in the human soul — a ceaseless tormented aspiration, a need for infinity, a thirst, a presentiment, a limitless expectation: liberty, equality, fraternity, dignity... "

― Romain Gary

19 " You’re right. One has to be mad. [...] Do you remember about the prehistoric reptile, the an- cestor of man, the first to emerge from the mud in early Paleozoic times, a milliard years ago, who set out to live in the air and to breathe, even though he had no lungs? [...] Well, he was mad too. Absolutely bats. That’s why he tried. He’s the ancestor of us all, and we shouldn’t forget it. But for him we wouldn’t be here. He was as crazy as they come. We too have got to try. That's what progress is. By trying like him, perhaps we’ll wind up with the necessary organs, the organ of dignity, of decency, or of fraternity. "

― Romain Gary , The Roots of Heaven

20 " At the darkest moments
of the war, in the thick of the bat-
tle, I always faced peril with a
feeling of invincibility. Nothing
could happen to me because
was her happy ending. "

― Romain Gary , Promise at Dawn