Soumission Quotes

“The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our compassion between two infinities of happiness and peace.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

“It’s hard to understand other people, to know what’s hidden in their hearts, and without the assistance of alcohol it might never be done at all.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Submission

“Only literature can grant you access to a spirit from beyond the grave—a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you’d have in conversation with a friend.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Submission

“It may well be impossible for people who have lived and prospered under a given social system to imagine the point of view of those who feel it offers them nothing, and who can contemplate its destruction without any particular dismay.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Submission

“I maintained a tactical silence. When you maintain a tactical silence and look people right in the eye, as if drinking in their words, they talk. People like to be listened to, as every researcher knows--every researcher, every writer, every spy.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

“We feel nostalgia for a place simply because we’ve lived there, whether we lived well or badly scarcely matters. The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our companion between two infinities of happiness and peace.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

“Like literature, music can overwhelm you with sudden emotion, can move you to absolute sorrow or ecstasy; like literature, painting has the power to astonish, and to make you see the world through fresh eyes. But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting, or repugnant.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Submission

“Even in our deepest, most lasting friendships, we never speak as openly as when we face a blank page and address a reader we do not know.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

“To love a book is, above all, to love its author: we want to meet him again, we want to spend our days with him.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

“People don’t really care all that much about their own death. What they really worry about, their one real fixation, is how to avoid physical suffering as much as possible.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Submission

“I didn’t even want to fuck her, or maybe I kind of wanted to fuck her but I also kind of wanted to die, I couldn’t really tell.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Submission

“For men, love is nothing more than gratitude for the gift of pleasure,”
― Michel Houellebecq, Submission

“The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know,”
― Michel Houellebecq, Submission

“You have to take an interest in something in life, I told myself. I wondered what could interest me, now that I was finished with love. I could take a course in wine tasting, maybe, or start collecting model aeroplanes.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

“It’s submission,” Rediger murmured. “The shocking and simple idea, which had never been so forcefully expressed, that the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

“It was amazing, even, to think that the only thing left to people in their despair was reading.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Submission

“Maybe my dissertation really had been as brilliant as he claimed, the truth was I remember almost nothing about it; the intellectual leaps I made when I was young were a distant memory to me, and now I was surrounded by a kind of aura, when really my only goal in life was to do a little reading and get in bed at four in the afternoon with a carton of cigarettes and a bottle; and yet, at the same time, I had to admit, I was going to die if I kept that up – I was going to die fast, unhappy and alone. And did I really want to die fast, unhappy and alone? In the end, only kind of.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

“As I got older, I also found myself agreeing more with Nietzsche, as is no doubt inevitable once your plumbing starts to fail.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

“All I knew was that once again I found myself alone, with even less desire to live and nothing to look forward to but aggravations.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Submission

“It's hard to understand other people, to know what's hidden in their hearts, and without the assistance of alcohol it might never be done.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

“Aggression often masks a desire to seduce – I’d read that in Boris Cyrulnik, and Boris Cyrulnik isn’t fucking around.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

“They were really willing to pay to avoid any trouble. No doubt they had overestimated the ability of academics to make a nuisance of themselves. It had been years since an academic title gained you access to major media.... Even if all the university professors in France had risen up in protest, almost nobody would have noticed, but apparently they hadn't found that out in Saudi Arabia. They still believed, deep down, in the power of the intellectual elite. It was almost touching.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

“Should I just die? The decision struck me as premature.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Submission

“There is no Israel for me.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

“The feeling of closeness when we talked on the phone was too violent, and the void that came afterward too cruel.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Submission

“The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know, unless you happen to be an especially gifted student, in which case it prepares you for a career teaching the academic study of literature—it is, in other words, a rather farcical system that exists solely to replicate itself and yet manages to fail more than 95 percent of the time.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Submission

“To be fair, when I was young, the elections could not have been less interesting; the mediocrity of the ‘political offerings’ was almost surprising. A centre-left candidate would be elected, serve either one or two terms, depending how charismatic he was, then for obscure reasons he would fail to complete a third. When people got tired of that candidate, and the centre-left in general, we’d witness the phenomenon of democratic change, and the voters would install a candidate of the centre-right, also for one or two terms, depending on his personal appeal. Western nations took a strange pride in this system, though it amounted to little more than a power-sharing deal between two rival gangs, and they would even go to war to impose it on nations that failed to share their enthusiasm.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

“That old queer Nietzsche had it right: Christianity was, at the end of the day, a feminine religion.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Submission

“Like literature, music can overwhelm you with sudden emotion, can move you to absolute sorrow or ecstasy; like literature, painting has the power to astonish, and to make you see the world through fresh eyes. But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting or repugnant. Only literature can give you access to a spirit from beyond the grave – a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you’d have in conversation with a friend. Even in our deepest, most lasting friendships, we never speak as openly as when we face a blank page and address a reader we do not know. The beauty of an author’s style, the music of his sentences have their importance in literature, of course; the depth of an author’s reflections, the originality of his thought certainly can’t be overlooked; but an author is above all a human being, present in his books, and whether he writes very well or very badly hardly matters – as long as he gets the books written and is, indeed, present in them.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

“they argue that belief in a transcendent being conveys a genetic advantage: that couples who follow one of the three religions of the Book and maintain patriarchal values have more children than atheists or agnostics. You see less education among women, less hedonism and individualism. And to a large degree, this belief in transcendence can be passed on genetically. Conversions, or cases where people grow up to reject family values, are statistically insignificant. In the vast majority of cases, people stick with whatever metaphysical system they grow up in. That’s why atheist humanism—the basis of any ‘pluralist society’—is doomed.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Submission