Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Raymond Queneau

French Poet and Novelist, Co-founder of Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Oulipo)

"Happy nations have no history. History is the study of mankind's misfortunes."

"Learning to learn is to know how to navigate in a forest of facts, ideas and theories, a proliferation of constantly changing items of knowledge. Learning to learn is to know what to ignore but at the same time not rejecting innovation and research."

"A very great Iliad... concerns the creation of a nation."

"All societies are historical."

"After the magical act accomplished by Joyce with Ulysses, perhaps we are getting away from it."

"All confessions are Odysseys."

"Being or nothing, that is the question. Ascending, descending, coming, going, a man does so much that in the end he disappears."

"Every great work is an Iliad or an Odyssey, the odysées being much larger than the Iliads: the Satyricon , The Divine Comedy , Pantagruel , Don Quixote , and of course Ulysses (where the direct influence it also recognizes of Bouvard and Pécuchet ) are odysées, that is to say, stories full time. The Iliads are instead researching the lost time at Troy, on a desert island or the Guermantes. "

"Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey."

"He sought an adventure but didn't find one. He was inexperienced and besides he didn't have too much imagination."

"I don't know how long I stayed in that particular place my poor memory is not a chronometer nor a movie camera nor a phonograph nor any other sort of finely tuned machine. It's more like nature with holes empty spaces hidden nooks and crannies with rivers that trickle away so that you can never dip your foot in the same water twice and with patches of light and darkness."

"His thoughts were hemmed in. One can only draw curved lines on the terrestrial sphere which, as they extend, forever meet with themselves. At such intersections we always encounter what we have already seen."

"In the Odyssey, there are technical refinements which are extremely remarkable, and I'm surprised they aren't mentioned more often."

"Man's usual routine is to work and to dream and work and dream."

"It doesn't seem to me that anyone has discovered much that's new since the Iliad or the Odyssey."

"Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything."

"One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey."

"It is the creator of fiction's point of view; it is the character who interests him. Sometimes he wants to convince the reader that the story he is telling is as interesting as universal history."

"Religions tend to disappear with man's good fortune"

"One must see everything."

"There have been only rare moments in history where individual histories were able to run their course without wars or revolutions."

"The Odyssey is the story of Americans up to the point where they are well-established, and even so it is detached from the historical side."

"To have one's own story told by a third party who doesn't know that the character in question is himself the hero of the story being told, that's a technical refinement."

"The Iliad is the private lives of people thrown into disorder by history."

"Ulysses finds himself unchanged, aside from his experience, at the end of his odyssey."

"We have come from all the countries of the world and are going to Saintes-Maries de la Mer. Nomads of the enigma, we gather there each year after having carried our mystery through ordinary countryside and fluid towns. Since we become transformed by our wanderings we are despised by those who stand still and retain a memory of giant serpents and metallic green."

"We have gotten away from this double aspect of either putting the character back into historical events or of making a historical event of his very life."

"When One made love to Zero, spheres embraced their arches and prime numbers caught their breath."

"We think of giving importance to history, but it is the individual who is interesting, and we want to give him a historical importance."

"When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing."

"Ah, to die on a Hispano, blessed and muttered, pulling out a gun from his pocket, he killed himself. What a dirty snob!"

"And before coming to Manila, the first harbinger of the East, including Stobel as his wanderings he had never served other than to take him to places unknown."

"As the saying goes: time is money- so give me some money to think."

"A chance meeting, a statement by the case have changed habits that always seemed to be confirmed; and a trip confirms' anxiety ."

"Dino had gone, had left me with my dreams, leaving me, the infidel, the harsh reality of a reserved seat on a European overexpressed."

"But Turandot pops out of his bistro, bottom of the stairs, he shouts at him: Hey little, where are you going like that? Zazie does not respond, it simply step out."

"Education! He sees what is education, sir? You learn as much at school, it is hard, and not a little, to learn as much at school, and then, twenty years later, or maybe before, it is not so, things have changed, if they do not ... knows nothing. So not worth it. That's why I like to think that learning more.(With blue flowers )"

"Duca d'Auge sighed without interrupting the careful consideration of those phenomena worn."

"Five francs, one hundred money, the ones that will give you, right here: my five francs that I gained with my fruit and vegetable St. Anthony of Padua, where Parisians come back this year as in previous years, with the car and daughters and friends, especially with his daughters, especially the big blonde, and when they return from me to buy fruit and olives to be taken with a drink and then they take it from my neighbor Bossu, the bartender. They come back, they come back, I pray St. Anthony. Next door is their home that maybe Please do not return it instead. Blessed St. Anthony, do that my prayer is stronger than his. If you question this, it means you have bad intentions. My intentions are not bad. It is not so much to the gain on the fruit that I do them I have bought that I care upon their return. Here it is: I wish you had them back to the fact that it is a pleasure to see them because they are rich and they are beautiful, the girls of course. And I do not say this because of the girls, because I'm married, you know the great St. Anthony of Padua, because I'm married even though my wife is not very nice to me. And he added, as a true cugiano: My God, pray for me St. Anthony of Padua."

"Friendly conversation , friendly conversation, you cannot do anything."

"He wanted to be content with an identity nicely chopped into pieces of varying lengths, but whose character was always similar, without dyeing it in autumnal colors, drenching it in April showers or mottling it with the instability of clouds."

"He could not imagine that every time he passed in front of her shop, she looked at him, the shopkeeper, the soldier Br–. He walked with ease, cheerfully infustito persimmon, hat what he saw under the kepi, hat trimmed regularly and almost shine, hands along the seam of his pants, hands one of which, the right rose at irregular intervals to meet a higher grade or to reply to the greeting of some demobilized."

"Huns cooked steak tartare, smoked gitanes the Gaulois, the Romans drew Greek, Franks played lire, the Saracineschi closed shutters. The Normans bevevan Calvados."

"Hou hou, the slut, they shouted, oh the ugly deflated, the crappy larded, swine lope, the awful p‚tochard, the unpatriotic, the cursed boar, the ugly ringworm, shameless coward, the poplican felon lousy weakling, coward crassou, ord coward, the cowardly traitor who wants to leave the tomb of Jesus sire the hands of pagans and poorly responsive to his king. Vive Louis de Poissy! Hou hou, bitch."

"I did not want to refuse a claim but my love. When we arrived in Marseille, I did not know that the victory was from my experience. I looked not without anxiety all those objects stacked, scattered to form a harbor, and all architectures repairing smash multiple, cackling commotion that is part of life. The boat docked in front of a shed. Behind the hedge of the headlines and hotel porters wild with impatience, I saw Odile waiting for me."

"I?ll pun him so many puns that even his arrogance will finally be expunged."

"L ' humor is an attempt to scrape the great feelings of their stupidity."

"It seems to me that an author who has determined very new domains in literature is Gertrude Stein."

"Life? No leads, no anime, no mining, no takes him."

"Macchiffastapuzza, he asked Gabriel, sick and tired. Impossible, you never clean up. On paper it is written that in Paris there is not even eleven percent of apartments with bathroom, it's no wonder, but you can wash without it. All of these that I stan around, however, I must say that mica make great efforts. On the other hand, because dovrebb'essere a selection among the largest filthy Paris? There is no reason. This is the case. It is absurd to suppose that the people who are waiting at the Gare d'Austerlitz stinks more than the one that waits at Gare de Lyon. But, I say, but that smell. Gabriel took out a handkerchief from her sleeve mauve silk and we covered his nostrils."