The Gasp Quotes

“She was standing at the door, and the sheer visual delight, the sharp ache of happiness, something like the sight of fleeing moments of beauty that are so much a part of the life’s vanishing act, with its total absence of forever, filled him as usual with that greed, that tyrannical urge to seize, to keep and preserve and never lose again, which is perhaps how twenty thousand years ago the first image of an antelope came to be painted by an artist upon a rock. Then she put her blouse on and Time, the old robber baron, went by, carrying his loots away.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“I guess I’m only talking about my childhood. Things that become part of you when you’re a child and then you grow up and somehow they don’t—and that’s how you never get to be a mature person, an adult, with those naïve beliefs in you that never grew up...”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“Millions of people live in pain and anguish throughout the world, and it doesn’t leak. I mean, it doesn’t reach anyone. It isn’t catching, as you say.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“He was suddenly overcome with hatred for his own face, for its flat, hard tightness, the narrow lips, the pale, cold eyes, the deadness. Overkill, he thought. That’s what was showing on his face. Overkill. Shambles. You try hard, too hard, to get rid of that juvenile romantic in you and what happens then? You succeed, that’s what happens. And it shows forever on your face. It turns to stone.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“It’s too pragmatic for me,” Valenti said. “The know-how is good enough for technology, not for science.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“I was thinking of the new future that our Communist science is opening to us,” he said.
“Our people are fully aware of that,” Dr. Han Tse said rapidly. “Ever since we exploded our first bomb there has been happiness and rejoicing everywhere.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“He had even tried the violin a few years earlier. Anything to switch talents, but there was no escape. The compulsion was identical to that of any composer or poet for whom the meaning of his life was creation. One could only wonder what Picasso would have done to the world if he had been born a physicist. Terrifying thought...”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“Marc... don't you ever think of God?"
He tried to behave, but then despair always took the form of irony with him.
"Darling, you're pushing us poor scientists too hard. Give us time. We can't discover everything at once. Right now, we were able to isolate a new, cheap-the cheapest- source of energy. We haven't got to discovering God yet. In the last forty years, science's made a fantastic leap forward, but we haven't got that far yet. Progress always slows down before picking up again. Besides, this is a matter of funds, of government subsidies. We can't both land on the moon and discover God, there's simply not enough money for that kind of advance on all fronts.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“He didn’t believe in God, but he believed even less in cheapness. Besides, life’s never been anything else except a brief, frightened, bewildered shopping expedition.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“He tried to behave, but then despair always took the form of irony with him.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“Progress always slows down before picking up again.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“He was entirely free of what De Gaulle called, in the kitchen Latin of Molière, paralysus respectus, the kind of awed rigidity that seemed to get hold of every Frenchman in the general’s presence.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“Could you let me hear more, without the usual scientific jargon? All this talk of ‘antigravity’ and ‘antimatter’ sounds like scientists’ covering up a big, dark, uncomfortable gaping hole in their knowledge and understanding.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“A civilization worthy of that name will always feel guilty toward Man and that is, precisely, what makes it a civilization.” Pascal, probably. It’s always Pascal with the French, when it’s not La Rochefoucauld. Aristocratic bastards.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“She was too ignorant, uneducated, in that kind of physically sophisticated, lovely-assed Texan way. An American primitive.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“He was to tell André Malraux later: “Clemeneau used to say: ‘War is a much too serious business to be left to the military.’ And look what happened to Communism when the Communists got hold of it or to the Catholic Church in the hands of the clergy. We are rapidly approaching a point when it will no longer be possible to trust scientists with science.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“Mon général,” Mathieu said quietly, “ever since Greek mythology, Prometheus, Sisyphus, and then Faust, and all the rest— not forgetting, of course, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and other fables— everything, including Oedipus and atom, everything, has always begun as a poetic license, as a... metaphor and then invariably it became a hard, down-to-earth reality. The whole purpose of science, indeed, seems to be a validation of metaphors. Sodom and Gomorrah, materialistic West and materialistic East, all the parables and fables... as if all the metaphors were pointing to some historical and scientific truth. Mankind told itself everything about itself almost from the start, but it never believed it. If it comes to perish one day, it will be through sheer disbelief...”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“That might be, but that’s exactly where betrayal of human values begins: when the approach to science is merely scientific.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“What amazed Cardinal Sandomme not a little was that all the bishops present were behaving as if there were something new and unexpected in the situation, as if some new calamity had suddenly hit mankind’s spiritual fiber. Yet this was nothing but the latest step on the road of spiritual degradation mankind had taken long ago...”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“He gave up. It was no use. She wasn’t listening. He was finding himself in a situation as old as mankind itself: reason against superstition.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“I should’ve known it,” he groaned. “The moment you pick up a bare-assed stripper from the Crazy Horse, she’s bound to be religious.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“He switched the gasper off quickly before it burned the toaster and the whole damn table. Too much power. Technology again. Technology was the asshole of science.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“He felt sad, angry and sorry. It was impossible to let the people benefit fully from scientific and ideological progress without first raising the level of cultural awareness of the masses. They had to discard all the traditional molds that were still narrowing their minds.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“Yet the only answer to science was more science.
Neither was there a lack of clever rationalizations. The ethical way out of scientists who had built the “ultimate” nuclear weapon was that it would make war impossible. The Cercle Érasme had a similar purpose in mind: They were set on taking the power-mad giants even farther in the same direction.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“Marc, are there moments when I'm making you unhappy? Are there? That’s the real test. If I do, then you truly love me.”
“Now, that’s strange logic.”
“It isn’t either. Any good lay can make a man happy. You’ve had hundreds of women. How many of them had made you unhappy?”
“None.”
“Then you’ve never loved before.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“When the first atomic bomb was exploded successfully, Oppenheimer and Fermi flashed the code word: Baby satisfactorily born. A most befitting yell o triumph for the coming of age of technological civilization and for the death of culture. Since then hundreds of thousands of babies were satisfactorily born with defective genes or died of leukemia brought on by radiation. Compulsive creation, genius, what the hell do you want, clap censorship on science?”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“Morally speaking, the fathers of the hydrogen bomb had nothing to do with the latter. They were cracking not ethics, not culture, not our soul, but a scientific and technological problem.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“All that was still needed was genuine inspiration, a flash of pure poetry that would make all the difference between an elaborate, overcomplicated and clumsy effort and the simplicity of beauty.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“There were unfinished paintings against the wall that look promising because they were unfinished, and some finished ones that looked beyond hope.”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“He had even tried the violin a few years earlier. Anything to switch talents, but there was no escape. The compulsion was identical to that of any composer or poet for whom the meaning of his life was creation. One could only wonder what Picasso would have done to the world if he had been born a physicist. Terrifying thought...”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp