Le Grand Meaulnes

“This evening, which I have tried to spirit away, is a strange burden to me. While time moves on, while the day will soon end and I already wish it gone, there are men who have entrusted all their hopes to it, all their love and their last efforts. There are dying men or others who are waiting for a debt to come due, who wish that tomorrow would never come. There are others for whom the day will break like a pang of remorse; and others who are tired, for whom the night will never be long enough to give them the rest that they need. And I - who have lost my day - what right do I have to wish that tomorrow comes?””

— Alain-Fournier

“Je pensais de meme que notre jeunesse etait finie et le bonheur manqué. I thought too that our youth was over and we had failed to find happiness.””

— Alain-Fournier

“Weeks went by, then months. I am speaking of a far-away time - a vanished happiness. It fell to me to befriend, to console with whatever words I could find, one who had been the fairy, the princess, the mysterious love-dream of our adolescence - and it fell to me because my companion had fled. Of that period ... what can I say? I've kept a single image of that time, and it is already fading: the image of a lovely face grown thin and of two eyes whose lids slowly droop as they glance at me, as if her gaze was unable to dwell on anything but an inner world.””

— Alain-Fournier

“Be my friends against the day I shall be on the brink of hell, as I was once before””

— Alain-Fournier

“If you feel you ought to go, if I came to you at a moment when nothing could make you happy, if it's necessary for you to leave me now so that you may some day come back to me at peace, then it is I who ask you to go...””

— Alain-Fournier

“I've kept a single image of that time, and it is already fading: the image of a lovely face grown thin and of two eyes whose lids slowly droop as they glance at me, as if her gaze was unable to dwell on anything but an inner world.””

— Alain-Fournier

“We said to him: here is your happiness, here is what you spent your whole youth looking for, here is the girl you saw in all your dreams! How could anyone, pushed by the shoulders like that, avoid a reaction of indecision, then fear, then dismay--how could he resist the temptation to escape?””

— Alain-Fournier

“Tranquil since he had arranged his room, the boy felt perfectly happy. He was there, mysterious, a stranger, in the middle of an unknown world, in the room he had chosen.””

— Alain-Fournier

“This was the setting in which the most troubled and most precious days of my life were lived: an abode from which our adventurings flowed out, to flow back again like waves breaking on a lonely headland.””

— Alain-Fournier