Sagesse : Anne Barratin et Zadie Smith

Anne Barratin 1832-1915 (ou 1845-1911 ?)

Chemin faisant (Éd. Lemerre, Paris, 1894) :

«On ne se noie pas à la même profondeur de l'eau, on ne se blase pas à la même hauteur de la coupe.» (p. 42)

Pensées in Oeuvres posthumes (Alphonse Lemerre, 1920) :

«C'est savoir aimer que de savoir dire la vérité.» (p. 53)

«La véritable émotion est sans voix.» (p. 184)

«Les conséquences se cachent pour nous laisser libres.» (p. 184)

«Ce qu'on ne peut pas reprocher à la souffrance, c'est le manque de variété.» (p. 187)

«La patience ne meurt pas toujours de mort subite : souvent aussi elle est longtemps malade avant de mourir.» (p. 191)

«Les rêves ont rarement la vie longue, maisils l'ont intense.» (p. 191)

«On peut aimer et détester dans la même heure.» (p. 195)

«On ne console pas une vraie douleur, on lui parle.» (p. 197)

«Je préfère l'espoir qui meurt subitement à celui qui agonise.» (p. 211)

«Si tu ne peux pas faire de grandes choses, fais-en de bonnes.» (p. 221)

Source des citations :

http://www.gilles-jobin.org/citations/?P=b&au=676  

Zadie Smith (Photograph by Dominique Nabokov)

“On Optimism and Despair,” originally delivered two days after the 2016 American presidential election as an award acceptance speech in Germany (later adapted for her altogether essay collection Feel Free – public library.

Source: http://www.brainpickings.org/ 

Excerpt

“All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up,” John Steinbeck wrote to his best friend at the peak of WWII. “It isn’t that the evil thing wins – it never will – but that it doesn’t die.”

“I find these days that a wistful form of time travel has become a persistent political theme, both on the right and on the left. On 10 November The New York Times reported that nearly seven in ten Republicans prefer America as it was in the fifties, a nostalgia of course entirely unavailable to a person like me, for in that period I could not vote, marry my husband, have my children, work in the university I work in, or live in my neighborhood. Time travel is a discretionary art: a pleasure trip for some and a horror story for others. Meanwhile some on the left have time-travel fancies of their own, imagining that the same rigid ideological principles once applied to the matters of workers’ rights, welfare and trade can be applied unchanged to a globalized world of fluid capital.”

“Only the willfully blind can ignore that the history of human existence is simultaneously the history of pain: of brutality, murder, mass extinction, every form of venality and cyclical horror. No land is free of it; no people are without their bloodstain; no tribe entirely innocent. But there is still this redeeming matter of incremental progress. It might look small to those with apocalyptic perspectives, but to she who not so long ago could not vote, or drink from the same water fountain as her fellow citizens, or marry the person she chose, or live in a certain neighborhood, such incremental change feels enormous.”

“Meanwhile the dream of time travel – for new presidents, literary journalists and writers alike – is just that: a dream. And one that only makes sense if the rights and privileges you are accorded currently were accorded to you back then, too. If some white men are more sentimental about history than anyone else right now, it’s no big surprise: their rights and privileges stretch a long way back. For a black woman the expanse of livable history is so much shorter. What would I have been and what would I have done – or more to the point, what would have been done to me – in 1360, in 1760, in 1860, in 1960? I do not say this to claim some pedestal of perfect victimhood or historical innocence. I know very well how my West African ancestors sold and enslaved their tribal cousins and neighbors. I don’t believe in any political or personal identity of pure innocence and absolute rectitude.

    But neither do I believe in time travel. I believe in human limitation, not out of any sense of fatalism but out of a learned caution, gleaned from both recent and distant history.”

“We will never be perfect: that is our limitation. But we can have, and have had, moments in which we can take genuine pride.”

“People who believe in fundamental and irreversible changes in human nature are themselves ahistorical and naive. If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world – and most recently in America – the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind. Here in Germany you will remember these martial songs; they are not a very distant memory. But there is no place on earth where they have not been played at one time or another. Those of us who remember, too, a finer music must try now to play it, and encourage others, if we can, to sing along.”