Best 13 quotes of Jean-christophe Valtat on MyQuotes

Jean-christophe Valtat

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    Jean-christophe Valtat

    Clusters of distant lights was the view of Mankind that he liked the best. The lights had the archaic charm of little fires on a plain, and the frailty about them, if it did not excuse anything, at least explained a lot of Man's stubborn ruthlessness. Mankind had not started the mess that was life, after all. And on the whole, it had been an interesting species to be a part of, the girls especially, as long as you remembered to watch your back.

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    Jean-christophe Valtat

    Could it be, God forbid, that nationality is only a superficial, insignificant layer of the onion that is your being? What would you think of the man who would say of himself 'I am an overcoat' just because he happened to be wearing one?

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    Jean-christophe Valtat

    ... even if the previous millisecond is closer to us than the birth of the universe, it is equally out of reach.

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    Jean-christophe Valtat

    I have heard about your gifts myself, Miss Roth,' read the subtitle under Brentford's awkward mumble.

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    Jean-christophe Valtat

    I heard there was a riot.' 'There was a demonstration, which I think is different. It was peaceful until it was interrupted.' Mason seemed to be thinking hard about it. 'What sort of demonstration?' 'Hmm... A new kind. It looked poetical at first but then became rather poletical.

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    Jean-christophe Valtat

    It was the French of the Normans that, grafting itself onto the barbaric Saxon tongue, gave it its most magnificent blossoming. And, in these new countries, where both English and French are intertwined again, it is as if English were bathing itself in the fountain of its own youth, and as if French were remembering the buried treasures it had thought forgotten.

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    Jean-christophe Valtat

    ... Paris was no more Babylon than it was New Jerusalem. All cities worthy of that name were both: they were one because they were the other...

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    Jean-christophe Valtat

    The blizzard seemed to be dying down, and it was now possible to enjoy the sight of the buildings and embankments and bridges smothered in the diamond-dusted whiteness. There's always something soothing in the snow, thought Gabriel, a promise of happiness and absolution, of a new start on a clean sheet. Snow redesigned the streets with hints of another architecture, even more magnificent, more fanciful than it already was, all spires and pinnacles on pale palaces of pearl and opal. All that New Venice should have been reappeared through its partial disappearance. It was as if the city were dreaming about itself and crystallizing both that dream and the ethereal unreality of it. He wallowed in the impression, badly needing it right now, knowing it would not last as he hobbled nearer to his destination.

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    Jean-christophe Valtat

    The entrance archway opened onto the vast rotunda of Hyperboree Hall. Its floor was a circular map of the polar regions, where the Arctic seas were made of white marble and the islands were cut-out slabs of polished granite decorated with little figures in minute mosaics, drawn, if Brentford remembered correctly, from the Olaus Magnus and Nicolo Zeno depictions of the North. It mixed almost accurate cartography with phantom islands, mythological monsters, and imaginary people, among whom New Venetians were prone and proud to count themselves.

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    Jean-christophe Valtat

    The news took a moment to sink in, probably because there was no bottom for it to alight upon.

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    Jean-christophe Valtat

    They were working hard at their own myth.

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    Jean-christophe Valtat

    Vassily cleared his throat, probably impatient with Gabriel's bookshelf manners. 'You'll have to excuse me,' Gabriel said, putting back the booklet, 'I have a severe addiction to ink.' 'Don't we all?' Vassily nodded. 'Thank God we have other addictions to assuage it a little.

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    Jean-christophe Valtat

    When in doubt, do what they do in books, was one of Gabriel's secret mottos and - that rarest of things - a principle that he actually lived by.