Leave me with my life of the imagination. Your petty pestering, your details of real life, which all upset me to some degree, would drag me down from… - Stendhal
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Leave me with my life of the imagination. Your petty pestering, your details of real life, which all upset me to some degree, would drag me down from heaven. Each person dies as best he may; my wish is not to think of death except in my own way.
Marie-Henri Beyle (January 23, 1783 – March 23, 1842), more widely known as Stendhal, the most famous of his many pen-names, was a 19th century French writer.
Biography information from
Wikiquote·
Portrait adapted from
Wikimedia Commons, Olof Johan Södermark (Public domain / CC0)
Also Known As
Pen Names:
Henri Stendhal
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Stendalis
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Louis Alexandre Bombet
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Anastase de Serpière
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Don Flegme
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William Crocodile
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Dominique
Alternative Names:
Henri Beyle
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Marie Henri Beyle
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Marie-Henri Beyle
People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure, even that to be found in reading a story.
A melancholy air can never be the right thing; what you want is a bored air. If you are melancholy, it must be because you want something, there is something in which you have not succeeded. It is shewing your inferiority. If you are bored, on the other hand, it is the person who has tried in vain to please you who is inferior.
— Mais c'est de l'égotisme abominable que tous ces détails ! — Sans doute, et qu'est ce livre, autre chose qu'un abominable égotisme ! [...] Si ce livre est ennuyeux, au bout de deux ans il enveloppera le beurre chez l'épicier ; s'il n'ennuie pas, on verra que l'égotisme, mais sincère, est une façon de peindre ce cœur humain dans la connaissance duquel nous avons fait des pas de géant depuis 1721, époque des Lettres persanes de ce grand homme que j'ai tant étudié : Montesquieu.
