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Balzac's Lives QUOTES

Balzac's Lives QUOTES

1 " To possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others: this I think captures our love of and our need for novels, for fictional accounts of the world that let us experience it beyond the limits of our own pair of eyes, to imagine it, provisionally, as it is seen and felt by someone else, however different that person may be. "

― Peter Brooks , Balzac's Lives

2 " Cognitive psychologists have confirmed what we already knew: that readers of complex novels show a greater capacity for understanding the complexities of human interaction.8 "

― Peter Brooks , Balzac's Lives

3 " Sigmund Freud finished what was to be his final reading. “Freud did not read at random,” Schur tells us, “but carefully selected books from his library.”8 His final choice fell on Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin. When he finished the book—the day before he called for the fatal injection—he remarked to Schur: “This was the proper book for me to read; it deals with shrinking and starvation.” Not only with shrinking and starvation but with all that precedes the final outcome of human desire: wanting, having, possessing, devouring. "

― Peter Brooks , Balzac's Lives

4 " if you don’t desire anything, the world is without appeal, it loses its beauty. You lack for everything, yet nothing now triggers the need to devour, to incorporate, to make the beautiful object one’s own. If the self ’s relation to the external world no longer is subtended by desire, it loses all meaning. Raphaël’s life is a kind of vegetation, a life without movement or meaning. "

― Peter Brooks , Balzac's Lives

5 " Everywhere in Balzac desire is an urge to find out, to know (Freud’s epistemophilia), which is to say that the drive to know is itself sexualized. "

― Peter Brooks , Balzac's Lives

6 " As Baudelaire remarked, even Balzac’s concierges have genius; everyone in his world is “stuffed with willpower from head to toe. "

― Peter Brooks , Balzac's Lives

7 " Through fictions, we accommodate ourselves to a world that is not ours, much less ourselves. As psychoanalysts and child psychologists confirm, we cannot cope with reality without made-up stories "

― Peter Brooks , Balzac's Lives

8 " There is no resting place; you have to keeping trying to get it all down on the page. Silence threatens: as for Balzac’s fictional Dante, writing is a constant skirmish with nothingness. "

― Peter Brooks , Balzac's Lives

9 " Balzac knew intuitively the need for invented persons to represent life for us, with an enhanced sense of the odds and stakes of life. Representation for Balzac always touched on the theatrical, offering life bathed in starker, more revealing light. "

― Peter Brooks , Balzac's Lives

10 " newspapers are “poison shops,” and Vignon piles on: The newspaper, instead of being a sacred mission, has become an arm for the political parties; and from that it became a commercial enterprise; and like all commercial enterprises it knows neither faith nor law. Every newspaper, as Blondet puts it, is a shop where one sells to the public words in whatever color it likes . . . all newspapers will in due course be cowardly, hypocritical, shameless, mendacious, murderous; they will kill ideas, systems, men, and will thrive from doing so. "

― Peter Brooks , Balzac's Lives

11 " Rastignac’s story speaks to an age of revolution and counterrevolution, of blurred and reasserted class boundaries, a turbulent age in which the pursuit of wealth has taken on stark new importance. Success requires learning to read subtle distinctions of class and the meanings embodied in the Paris cityscape. In this bourgeois century where everyone looks alike you are going to have to find out for yourself who’s who. If you are ambitious and if you are out for love, you will need to choose wisely to advance your career. You need to understand both the social hierarchy and the economic substratum that lies hidden beneath it. "

― Peter Brooks , Balzac's Lives

12 " Your Paris is only a mudhole.” To which Vautrin responds with a new generalization: “And a very strange mudhole,” he says. “Those whose carriage gets muddy in its streets are respectable, those who get muddy on foot are crooks. Have the misfortune to snatch some trifle and you are put on display in the law courts. Steal a million, you’re noted in the drawing rooms as a man of honor. "

― Peter Brooks , Balzac's Lives

13 " Not to be taken in is something Père Goriot as a whole teaches: it’s about learning to see the world as it is, not as it claims to be. "

― Peter Brooks , Balzac's Lives

14 " If Paris may itself be compared to a battlefield, in the post-Napoleonic, proto-capitalist Restoration the way you win in its struggles is not by arms—despite Vautrin’s rigged duel—but by insinuation, charm, gathering information, possessing social secrets. "

― Peter Brooks , Balzac's Lives

15 " the polite and polished superstructure of society must never be seen in relation to the substructure of money-grubbing and exploitation that allows it to exist. "

― Peter Brooks , Balzac's Lives

16 " Goriot was “a grease spot in his daughters’ drawing rooms.” Once they squeezed the money out of him he’s discarded “like a lemon peel” in the gutter. The moral drawn by the Duchesse: “Society is a mudhole. Let’s try to remain up on the heights. "

― Peter Brooks , Balzac's Lives

17 " Journalism, it turns out, is just so much hot air, hot type rather, that has an extraordinary importance at the moment but leaves nothing behind. It is the very opposite of the true poetic word that endures—what Lucien originally aspired to but betrayed "

― Peter Brooks , Balzac's Lives

18 " You came back here that day with a word written on your forehead that I could read: ‘Succeed! Succeed at any price.’ ” To which Vautrin responds: “Bravo! That’s the kind of fellow I like.” (SC 111/P 3:139) To revolt is to take destiny into your own hands by a decisive act. "

― Peter Brooks , Balzac's Lives

19 " everything,” Balzac claims, “is a mosaic. "

― Peter Brooks , Balzac's Lives

20 " Here we sense a parallel: Facino’s conviction that his power to “see” gold has blinded him sounds very much like the narrator’s fear that his preternatural insight into the lives of others, allowing him passage into their very bodies and souls, may be an abuse of his mental faculties—the word “abus” is used in both these instances. "

― Peter Brooks , Balzac's Lives