Top 40 Pascal Mercier Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.”

— Pascal Mercier

2. “When dictatorship is a fact, revolution is a duty!”

— Pascal Mercier

3. “Life is not what we live; it is what we imagine we are living.”

— Pascal Mercier

4. “The real director of our life is accident – a director full of cruelty, compassion and bewitching charm.”

— Pascal Mercier

5. “A feeling is no longer the same when it comes the second time. It dies through the awareness of its return. We become tired and weary of our feelings when they come too often and last too long.”

— Pascal Mercier

6. “We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.”

— Pascal Mercier

7. “Then there was a silence he had never before experienced: in it, you could hear the years.”

— Pascal Mercier

8. “To understand yourself: Is that a discovery or a creation?”

— Pascal Mercier

9. “I am still there, at that distant place in time, I never left it, but live expanded in the past, or out of it.”

— Pascal Mercier

10. “Sometimes, we are afraid of something because we’re afraid of something else.”

— Pascal Mercier

11. “So, the fear of death might be described as the fear of not being able to become whom one had planned to be.”

— Pascal Mercier

12. “I love tunnels. They ’re the symbol of hope: sometime it will be bright again. If by chance it is not night.”

— Pascal Mercier

13. “That words could cause something in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or cry: even as a child he had found it extraordinary and it never stopped impressing him. How did words do that? Wasn’t it like magic?”

— Pascal Mercier

14. “What is it that we call loneliness. It can’t simply be the absence of others, you can be alone and not lonely, and you can be among people and yet be lonely. So what is it?”

— Pascal Mercier

15. “To live for the moment: it sounds so right and so beautiful. But the more I want to, the less I understand what it means.”

— Pascal Mercier

16. “Our lives are rivers, gliding free to that unfathomed, boundless sea, the silent grave!”

— Pascal Mercier

17. “Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us – what happens with the rest?”

— Pascal Mercier

18. “Loyalty... A will, a decision, a resolution of the soul.”

— Pascal Mercier

19. “In the years afterward, I fled whenever somebody began to understand me. That has subsided. But one thing remained: I don’t want anybody to understand me completely. I want to go through life unknown. The blindness of others is my safety and my freedom.”

— Pascal Mercier

20. “When we talk about ourselves, about others, or simply about things, we want- it could be said – to reveal ourselves in our words: We want to show what we think and feel. We let other have a glimpse into our soul.”

— Pascal Mercier

21. “It is not the pain and the wounds that are the worst. The worst is the humiliation.”

— Pascal Mercier

22. “There were people who read and there were the others. Whether you were the a reader or a non-reader was soon apparent. There was no greater distinction between people.”

— Pascal Mercier

23. “Of the thousand experiences we have, we find language for one at most and even this one merely by chance and without the care it deserves.”

— Pascal Mercier

24. “Kitsch is the most pernicious of all prisons. The bars are covered with the gold of simplistic, unreal feelings, so that you take them for the pillars of a palace.”

— Pascal Mercier

25. “I often feel an aversion, even disgust at the same words written and spoken over and over – at the same expressions, phrases, and metaphors repeated. And the worst is, when I listen to myself I have to admit that I too endlessly repeat the same things. They’re so horribly frayed and threadbare, these words, worn out by constant overuse. Do they still have any meaning?”

— Pascal Mercier

26. “I revere the word of God for I love its poetic force. I loathe the word of God for I hate its cruelty. The love is a difficult love for it must incessantly separate the luminosity of the words and the violent verbal subjugation by a complacent God. The hatred is a difficult hatred for how can you allow yourself to hate words that are part of the melody of life in this part of the world? Words that taught us early on what reverence is?”

— Pascal Mercier

27. “They aren’t texts, Gregorius. What people say aren’t texts. They simply talk.”

— Pascal Mercier

28. “We are stratified creatures, creatures full of abysses, with a soul of inconstant quicksilver, with a mind whose color and shape change as in a kaleidoscope that is constantly shaken.”

— Pascal Mercier

29. “What did i know of your fantasies? Why do we know so little about the fantasies of our parents? What do we know of somebody if we know nothing of the images passed to him by his imagination?”

— Pascal Mercier

30. “I start trembling at the very thought of the unplanned and unknown, but inevitable and unstoppable force with which parents leave traces in their children that, like traces of branding, can never be erased. The outlines of parental will and fear are written with a white-hot stylus in the souls of the children who are helpless and ignorant of what is happening to them. We need a whole life to find and decipher the branded text and we can never be sure we have understood it.”

— Pascal Mercier

31. “Isn’t it true that it’s not people who meet, but rather the shadows cast by their imaginations?”

— Pascal Mercier

32. “Extortion through trust. “Patients confided the most intimate things to him, and also the most dangerous,” said Adriana. “Politically dangerous, I mean. And then they expected him to divulge something too. So they wouldn’t have to feel naked. He hated that. He hated it from the bottom of his heart. I don’t want anybody to expect anything of me, he said then and stamped his foot. And why the devil is it so hard to keep my distance?”

— Pascal Mercier

33. “But when we set out to understand somebody’s inside? Is that a trip that ever ends? Is the soul a place of facts? Or are the alleged facts only the deceptive shadows of our stories?”

— Pascal Mercier

34. “In intimacy, we are clasped into one another, and the invisible bonds are liberating shackles. this clasping is imperious: it demands exclusivity. to share is to betray. But we want to love and touch not only one single person. What to do? control the various intimacies? Strict bookkeeping of subjects, words, gestures? Mutual knowledge and secrets? It would be a silent trickling poison.”

— Pascal Mercier

35. “What else? Was this what came from thoughts of time running out and death: that all of a sudden you didn’t know anymore what you wanted? That you didn’t know your own will anymore? That you lost the obvious familiarity with your own wishes? And in this way became strange and a problem to yourself?”

— Pascal Mercier

36. “I am certain that all human action is an extremely imperfect, utterly helpless expression of a hidden life of unimagined depths that presses to the surface without ever being able to reach it.”

— Pascal Mercier

37. “Sometimes I go to the beach and stand facing the wind, which I wish were icy, colder than we know it in these parts. I wish it would blow all the hackneyed words, all the insipid habits of language out of me so that I could come back with a cleansed mind, cleansed of the banalities of the same talk.”

— Pascal Mercier

38. “He had walked on the beach and wished for icy winds to sweep away everything that sounded like mere linguistic habit, a malicious kind of habit that prevented thinking by producing the illusion that it had already taken place and found its conclusion in the hollow words.”

— Pascal Mercier

39. “Can God create a stone He couldn’t lift? If not, then He isn’t almighty; if yes, then He isn’t either, for now there is a stone He cannot lift.”

— Pascal Mercier

40. “Getting to know a city through the books in it – he had always done that.”

— Pascal Mercier

41. “Sleepless people were bound by a wordless solidarity.”

— Pascal Mercier

42. “But the light allowed no temptation to turn back. Its glow made the whole past into something very distant, almost unreal, the will lost every shadow of the past under its luminosity, and the only possibility was to depart into the future whatever it might consist of.”

— Pascal Mercier