Literary Birthday – 28 May – Muriel Barbery

Happy Birthday, Muriel Barbery, born 28 May 1969.

Seven Quotes

Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.
I followed a long, boring course of studies in philosophy. I expected it to help me understand better that which surrounds me: but it didn’t work out that way. Literature has taught me more.
The real ordeal is not leaving those you love but learning to live without those who don’t love you.
To tell a group of adolescents who already know how to speak and write that that is the purpose of grammar is like telling someone that they need to read a history of toilets through the ages in order to pee and poop.
Writing is an intimate, almost secret, activity. I only follow with my pen my own sensations and desires.
People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl. I wonder if it wouldn’t be simpler just to teach children right from the start that life is absurd.
Talent consists not in inventing shapes but in causing those that were invisible to emerge.

Muriel Barbery is a French novelist and professor of philosophy. she is the author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Muriel_Barbery.jpg

Elena Torre from Viareggio, Italia, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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Literary Birthday, Muriel Barbery

Posted on: 28th May 2014

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0 thoughts on “Literary Birthday – 28 May – Muriel Barbery”

heidisue
28th May 2014 at 3:42 pm

Love her quote about grammar! To use language well, we really don’t need to know what the names of the pieces are. Split infinitives drove me nuts, before I even knew what they were. A four year old can USE adjectives and verbs, nouns, prepositions, and all the parts of language, without ever knowing what they are called.