Sébastien Japrisot > Quotes

“We take it for granted that life moves forward. You build memories; you build momentum.You move as a rower moves: facing backwards.

You can see where you've been, but not where you’re going. And your boat is steered by a younger version of you.

It's hard not to wonder what life would be like facing the other way. Avenoir.

You'd see your memories approaching for years, and watch as they slowly become real.

You’d know which friendships will last, which days are important, and prepare for upcoming mistakes. You'd go to school, and learn to forget.

One by one you'd patch things up with old friends, enjoying one last conversation before you
meet and go your separate ways.

And then your life would expand into epic drama. The colors would get sharper, the world would feel bigger.

You'd become nothing other than yourself, reveling in your own weirdness.

You'd fall out of old habits until you could picture yourself becoming almost anything.

Your family would drift slowly together, finding each other again.

You wouldn't have to wonder how much time you had left with people, or how their lives would turn out.

You'd know from the start which week was the happiest you’ll ever be, so you could relive it again and again.

You'd remember what home feels like,
and decide to move there for good.

You'd grow smaller as the years pass, as if trying to give away everything you had before leaving.

You'd try everything one last time, until it all felt new again.

And then the world would finally earn your trust, until you’d think nothing of jumping freely into things, into the arms of other people.

You'd start to notice that each summer feels longer than the last.

Until you reach the long coasting retirement of childhood.

You'd become generous, and give everything back.

Pretty soon you’d run out of things to give, things to say, things to see.

By then you'll have found someone perfect; and she'll become your world.

And you will have left this world just as you found it.

Nothing left to remember, nothing left to regret, with your whole life laid out in front of you, and your whole life left behind.”
― The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“Sonder. You are the main character—the protagonist—the star at the center of your own unfolding story. You're surrounded by your supporting cast: friends and family hanging in your immediate orbit.

Scattered a little further out, a network of acquaintances who drift in and out of contact over the years.

But there in the background, faint and out of focus, are the extras. The random passersby. Each living a life as vivid and complex as your own.

They carry on invisibly around you, bearing the accumulated weight of their own ambitions, friends, routines, mistakes, worries, triumphs and inherited craziness.

When your life moves on to the next scene, theirs flickers in place, wrapped in a cloud of backstory and inside jokes and characters strung together with countless other stories you'll never be able to see. That you'll never know exists.

In which you might appear only once. As an extra sipping coffee in the background. As a blur of traffic passing on the highway. As a lighted window at dusk.”
― The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“She tries to move toward him, but the path is covered with gravel, which slows her down. Then he turns his head and sees her. He puts down his brush and comes closer, and the closer he comes, the closer he comes, the happier she is she didn't put on mascara, she doesn't want to cry but she can't help it, she can hardly see him through the welling tears. She quickly wipes her eyes. She looks at him. He's standing two steps away. She could stretch out her hand, he'd come even closer, she could touch him. He's the same, thinner, the most beautiful man in the world, with the eyes Germain Pire described to her, a very pale blue, almost gray, quiet and gentle, with something struggling in their depths, a child, a soul of agony. His voice hasn't changed.

The first thing she hears him say--it's terrible--he asks her, "You can't walk?" She shakes her head. He sighs, goes back to his painting. She pushes the wheels, moves toward the shed. He looks over at her again, he smiles. "You want to see what I'm doing?" She nods her head. "I'll show you in a little bit," he says. "But not right now, it's not finished."

So while she waits, she sits up straight in her scooter, she crosses her hands in her lap, she looks at him. Yes, she looks at him, she looks at him, life is long and can still carry a great deal more on its back.

She looks at him.”
― Sébastien Japrisot

“Opia. So much can be said in a glance. Such ambiguous intensity, both invasive and vulnerable—glittering black, bottomless and opaque. The eye is a keyhole, through which the world pours in and a world spills out. And for a few seconds, you can peek through into a vault, that contains everything they are. But whether the eyes are the windows of the soul or the doors of perception, it doesn't matter: you're still standing on the outside of the house. Eye contact isn't really contact at all. It's only ever a glance, a near miss, that you can only feel as it slips past you.

There’s so much we keep in the back room. We offer up a sample of who we are, of what we think people want us to be. But so rarely do we stop to look inside, and let our eyes adjust, and see what's really there. Because you too are peering out from behind your own door. You put yourself out there, trying to decide how much of the world to let in. It's all too easy for others to size you up, and carry on their way. They can see you more clearly than you ever could. And yours is the only vault you can't see into, that you can't size up in an instant.

So we're all just exchanging glances, trying to tell each other who we are, trying to catch a glimpse of ourselves, feeling around in the darkness.”
― The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“I'm pretty strong," he says. "I could cart you around on my back all day long. Hey, I could even teach you to swim."
'Tisn't true," she replies haughtily. "How could you do that?"
I know how--with floats, to keep your feet up."
She shakes her head. He puffs out his cheeks and whistles soundlessly. "I go fishing with my father on Sundays. I can bring you back a hake big as this!" He spreads his arms to show a fish about the size of a whale. "You like hake?"
She shakes her head.
Bass?"
Same response.
Crab claws? We got a lot of them, in the nets."
She turns her chair around and pushes the wheels along--now she's the one who goes away.
Snobby Parisienne!" he yells after her. "And to think I almost fell for you! I smell too fishy is that it?”
― sebastien japrisot

“You were born on a moving train.
And even though it feels like you're standing still,
time is sweeping past you, right where you sit.
But once in a while you look up,
and actually feel the inertia,
and watch as the present turns into a memory
—as if some future you is already looking back on it.

Dès Vu.

One day you’ll remember this moment,
and it’ll mean something very different.
Maybe you’ll cringe and laugh,
or brim with pride, aching to return.
or notice some detail hidden in the scene,
a future landmark making its first appearance
or discreetly taking its final bow.

So you try to sense it ahead of time, looking for clues,
as if you’re walking through the memory while it’s still happening,
feeling for all the world like a time traveler.

The world around you is secretly strange:
some details are charming and dated,
others precious and irretrievable,
but all fade into the quaint texture of the day.

You try to read the faces around you,
each fretting about the day’s concerns,
not yet realizing that this world is already out of their hands.
That it doesn’t have to be this way, it just sort of happened,
and everything will soon be completely different.

Because you really are a time traveler,
leaping into the future in little tentative steps.
Just a kid stuck in a strange land without a map,
With nothing to do but soak in the moment
and take one last look before moving on.

But another part of you is already an old man,
looking back on things.
Waiting at the door for his granddaughter,
who’s trying to make her way home for a visit.
You are two people still separated by an ocean of time,
Part of you bursting to talk about what you saw,
Part of you longing to tell you what it means.”
― The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“You were born with your head in the clouds,
your future wide open,
feeling almost weightless. Almost.

Kudoclasm.

You had dreams even before you had memories:
a cloud of fantasies and ambitions
of secret plans and hidden potential,
visions of who you are,
and what your life will be.

They keep your spirits high,
floating somewhere above your life,
where the world looks faintly hypothetical,
almost translucent.

But every time you reach for the sky
and come away with nothing,
you start to wonder what’s holding them up.
“Surely it would have happened by now?!”

You feel time starting to slip,
pulling you back down to earth.
even as you tell yourself,
don’t look down.

You don’t have the luxury of floating through life,
because you may not have the time.
The future is already rushing toward you,
and it’s not as far away as you think.

It feels like your life is flashing before your eyes,
but it’s actually just the opposite:
you’re thinking forward, to everything you still haven’t done,
the places you had intended to visit,
the life goals you’d eventually get around to,
some day in the future.

You start dropping your delusions one by one,
like tossing ballast overboard.
And soon the fog lifts,
and everything becomes clear—
right until the moment your feet touch the ground.

And there it is, “the real world.”
As if you’ve finally grown up, steeped in reality,
your eyes adjusting to the darkness,
seeing the world for what it is.
But in truth, you don’t belong there.
We dream to survive—
no more optional than breathing.
Maybe “the real world” is just another fantasy,
something heavy to push back against,
and launch ourselves still higher.

We’re all afraid to let go,
of falling into a bottomless future.
But maybe we belong in the air,
tumbling in the wind.
Maybe it’s only when you dive in
that you pick up enough speed
to shape the flow of reality,
and choose your own course,
flying not too high, and not too low,
but gliding from one to the other
in long playful loops.

To dream big,
and bounce ideas against the world
and rise again.

Moving so fast,
you can’t tell where the dream ends
and where the world begins.”
― The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“Zenosyne.

It's actually just after you're born that life flashes before your eyes.

Entire aeons are lived in those first few months when you feel inseparable from the world itself, with nothing to do but watch it passing by.

At first, time is only felt vicariously, as something that happens to other people. You get used to living in the moment, because there's nowhere else to go. But soon enough, life begins to move, and you learn to move with it. And you take it for granted that you're a different person every year,
Upgraded with a different body...a different future. You run around so fast, the world around you seems to stand still. Until a summer vacation can stretch on for an eternity.
You feel time moving forward, learning its rhythm, but now and then it skips a beat, as if your birthday arrives one day earlier every year.

We should consider the idea that youth is not actually wasted on the young. That their dramas are no more grand than they should be. That their emotions make perfect sense, once you adjust for inflation. For someone going through adolescence, life feels epic and tragic simply because it is: every kink in your day could easily warp the arc of your story. Because each year is worth a little less than the last. And with each birthday we circle back, and cross the same point around the sun. We wish each other many happy returns.

But soon you feel the circle begin to tighten, and you realize it's a spiral, and you're already halfway through. As more of your day repeats itself, you begin to cast off deadweight, and feel the steady pull toward your center of gravity, the ballast of memories you hold onto, until it all seems to move under its own inertia. So even when you sit still, it feels like you're running somewhere. And even if tomorrow you will run a little faster, and stretch your arms a little farther, you'll still feel the seconds slipping away as you drift around the bend.

Life is short. And life is long. But not in that order.”
― The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“The poor manufacture the engines of their own destruction, but it's the rich who sell them.”
― Sebastian Japrisot

“It was like a tear in the fabric of my sleep.”
― Sebastian Japrisot

“What was the stupid thing he had said? That no one is innocent; that everyone is guilty.
The mistake always she was made was to worry too much about what other people thought of her. She knew what it was they thought, and she also knew that they were wrong. A woman clinging to a vanished youth, trying to buy it back. The pain and wretchedness that they called sin. The specters of approaching age; the demons of the afternoon.”
― Sébastien Japrisot, 10:30 From Marseille

“ETYMOLOGY: Portmanteau of monism + onanism. In philosophy, monism is the view that a variety of things can be explained in terms of a single reality or substance, or a distinct source. Onism is a kind of monism, because your life is indeed limited to a single reality—by virtue of being restricted to a single body—but something is clearly missing. Meanwhile, onanism is another word for self-pleasure, transfixed inside your own menagerie of fantasies”
― The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“I'll keep waiting, for as long as it takes, for this war to be seen in everyone's eyes for what it always was, the most filthy, savage, useless obsenity that ever there was.”
― Sébastien Japrisot, Un long dimanche de fiancailles

“He walks slowly along beneath the dripping pine trees, staring straight ahead of him, like someone who has no idea where he is going, and his red bag is the only spot of bright colour in the driving rain.”
― Sébastien Japrisot, Rider on the Rain