Georges Perec Quotes

• From this, one can make a deduction which is quite certainly the ultimate truth of jigsaw puzzles: despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzlemaker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.

  Georges Perec

  Moving, Jigsaw Puzzles, Games

  Georges Perec (2012). “Life: A User's Manual”, p.191, Random House

  48 Copy quote

• Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless...antique shops, clothes, hi-fi, etc. Don't say, don't write 'etc'. Make an effort to exhaust the subject, even if that seems grotesque, or pointless, or stupid. You still haven't looked at anything, you've merely picked out what you've long ago picked out.

  Georges Perec

  Stupid, Writing, Long Ago

  24 Copy quote

• What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we go downstairs, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed on order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why? Describe your street. Describe another. Compare.

  Georges Perec

  Lying, Sleep, Glasses

  18 Copy quote

• This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text. Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the entire world is visible simultaneously, anything other than an alphabet?

  Georges Perec

  Space, Sea, Land

  21 Copy quote

• Question your tea spoons.

  Georges Perec

  Tea, Spoons

  11 Copy quote

• Every library answers a twofold need, which is often also a twofold obsession: that of conserving certain objects (books) and that of organizing them in certain ways

  Georges Perec

  Book, Library, Needs

  16 Copy quote

• It is on a day like this one, a little later, a little earlier, that you discover, without surprise, that something is wrong, that, without mincing words, you don't know how to live, that you will never know.

  Georges Perec

  Days Like This, Littles, Surprise

  "Things: A Story of the Sixties".

  13 Copy quote

• The idea occurred to him when he was twenty. At first it was only a vague idea, a question looming — what should I do? — with an answer taking shape: nothing.

  Georges Perec

  Ideas, Twenties, Answers

  Georges Perec (1987). “Life, a user's manual: fictions”, Collins Harvill Press

  17 Copy quote

• Chess is a fathead and feudal game.

  Georges Perec

  Games, Chess

  8 Copy quote

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