“I remember Castelnau: like me Ambassador to England, who wrote like me a narrative of his life in London. On the last page of Book VII, he says to his son: ‘I will deal with this event in Book VIII,’ and Book VIII of Castelnau’s Memoirs does not exist: that warns me to take advantage of being alive.”

— François-René de Chateaubriand , book Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe

Book VI: Ch. 8: Comparison of Washington and Bonaparte
Mémoires d'outre-tombe (1848 – 1850)
Context: I halt at the beginning of my travels, in Pennsylvania, in order to compare Washington and Bonaparte. I would rather not have concerned myself with them until the point where I had met Napoleon; but if I came to the edge of my grave without having reached the year 1814 in my tale, no one would then know anything of what I would have written concerning these two representatives of Providence. I remember Castelnau: like me Ambassador to England, who wrote like me a narrative of his life in London. On the last page of Book VII, he says to his son: ‘I will deal with this event in Book VIII,’ and Book VIII of Castelnau’s Memoirs does not exist: that warns me to take advantage of being alive.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I remember Castelnau: like me Ambassador to England, who wrote like me a narrative of his life in London. On the last p…" by François-René de Chateaubriand?

François-René de Chateaubriand photo

François-René de Chateaubriand 28

French writer, politician, diplomat and historian 1768–1848

Related quotes

“Books are like friends to me. Words come alive on the page.”

Beverly Lewis (1949) American writer

“Go on. Treat me like the page of a book. Your book.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Jerome, to Nagiko
The Pillow Book

“It was very emotional, actually. In the front of the book I wrote something Anton Chekhov wrote to the woman he ended up spending the rest of his life with: "Hello, the last page of my life."”

Daniel Radcliffe (1989) English actor

Which I thought was very appropriate.
On reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last book of the Harry Potter series, as quoted in "Daniel Radcliffe" by Chris Norris in Details (October 2008) http://men.style.com/details/blogs/thegadabout/2008/09/daniel-radcliff.html

“I do not like books. I believe I have the smallest library of any literary man in London, and I have no wish to increase it. I keep my books at the British Museum and at Mudie's, and it makes me very angry if anyone gives me one for my private library.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Ramblings In Cheapside (1890)

“I thought research would be more glamorous, somehow. I'd give the librarian a secret code word and he'd give me the one book I needed and whisper the necessary page numbers. Like a speakeasy. With books.”

Libba Bray book The Diviners

Source: The Diviners

“When I created Quirke, he was 6ft 6in and blond. But then a woman reader wrote to me and said, 'Why do you keep saying his hair is blond? It's not. It's brown.' I wrote back to her and told her that, of course, she was right. So I darkened his hair and now that he's being played by Gabriel Byrne; with each successive book he gets a bit smaller and smaller.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville: Who cares whodunnit? (2013)

“How ironic the difference between me and my young son Absalom, between his soliciting the soundest means of overtaking me and having my life, while I was cudgeling my brains for a way to spare his. "Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom," were my mawkish words to my commanders as their men trooped past me toward the positions they would take up in the field outside the wood of Ephraim for the battle in which he would die. "Beware that none touch the young man Absalom," I urged like a fool. No, not like a fool, but like a fond, doting father who will overlook and excuse everything in the child he loves best, and who breaks his heart. And in that singular disparity in our desires abides his lasting victory over me: I loved him and he did not love me.”

Joseph Heller book God Knows

God Knows (1984)

“I think of Neuromancer as being, in a good sense, an adolescent book. It's a young man's book. It was written very young-man's-book. It was written by a man who was not very young, when he wrote it, but who was sufficiently immature.”

William Gibson (1948) American-Canadian speculative fiction novelist and founder of the cyberpunk subgenre

No Maps for These Territories (2000)

“I recall an incident involving the late George Stigler at a conference in Spain in the 1980s. Hearing that I had written a book on reason and natural law, Stigler started to ridicule reason, going so far as to say that there is as much reason in a monkey's antics as in any human act. At that point I asked him whether he was trying to tell me something about how he wrote his books; he gave me a blank stare and stormed out of the room.”

Frank Van Dun (1947) Belgian law philosopher

"Argumentation Ethics and the Philosophy of Freedom," http://blog.mises.org/archives/005497.asp Ludwig von Mises Institute (2006-08-22).

“There will always be people like me, who believe that to ripple the pages of a printed book is a special experience, one that through the centuries has taken millions from the darkness into the light.”

Quintin Jardine (1945) Scottish writer

From Quintin Jardine’s blog, ‘The Kindle threat’, September 29, 2010.

Related topics