Quotes from book
The Abyss

Name: The Abyss
Author: Marguerite Yourcenar

Marguerite YourcenarOriginal title L'Œuvre au noir (French, 1968)

The Abyss is a 1968 novel by the Belgian-French writer Marguerite Yourcenar. Its narrative centers on the life and death of Zeno, a physician, philosopher, scientist and alchemist born in Bruges during the Renaissance era. The book was published in France in 1968 and was met with immediate popular interest as well as critical acclaim, obtaining the Prix Femina with unanimous votes the year of its publication. The English translation by Grace Frick has been published under the title The Abyss or alternatively Zeno of Bruges. Belgian filmmaker André Delvaux adapted it into a film in 1988.

“Few bipeds, from Adam's time down, have been worthy of the name of man.”

Marguerite Yourcenar book The Abyss

Peu de bipèdes depuis Adam ont mérité le nom d'homme.
"A Conversation in Innsbruck", p. 114
The Abyss (1968)

“Beyond this village, other villages; beyond this abbey, other abbeys; and after the fortress, more fortresses still. And each of these castles of stone and each wooden hut has its structure of fixed ideas or flimsy, ill-based opinions superposed above it within which fools stay immured, but the wise find apertures for escape.”

Marguerite Yourcenar book The Abyss

The Highroad, p. 11
The Abyss (1968)

“At this period of his existence, meat and blood, entrails, and all that had ever lived and breathed disgusted him as food, for an animal dies in pain just as man does, and it repelled him to be digesting death's agony.”

Marguerite Yourcenar book The Abyss

Source: The Abyss (1968), p. 190

“The world is big … May it please the One who perchance is to expand the human heart to life’s full measure.”

Marguerite Yourcenar book The Abyss

The Highroad, p. 11
The Abyss (1968)

“The skirmishes with the theologians had had their charm, but he knew well that no lasting accord exists between those who seek, ponder, and dissect and pride themselves on being capable of thinking tomorrow other than they do today, and those who accept the Faith, or declare that they do, and oblige their fellow men to do the same, on pain of death.”

Marguerite Yourcenar book The Abyss

il [Zénon] savait fort bien qu'il n'existe aucun accommodement durable entre ceux qui cherchent, pèsent, dissèquent, et s'honorent d'être capables de penser demain autrement qu'aujourd'hui, et ceux qui croient ou affirment croire, et obligent sous peine de mort leurs semblables à en faire autant.
The Indictment, p. 317
The Abyss (1968)

“Who would be so besotted as to die without having made at least the round of this, his prison?”

Marguerite Yourcenar book The Abyss

Qui serait assez insensé pour mourir sans avoir fait au moins le tour de sa prison?
The Highroad, p. 11
The Abyss (1968)

“Doubtless it signified one or the other meaning alternately, or perhaps both at the same time.”

Marguerite Yourcenar book The Abyss

Author's note, p. 367
The Abyss (1968)
Context: In alchemical treatises, the formula L'Oeuvre au Noir … designates what is said to be the most difficult phase of the alchemist's process, the separation and dissolution of substance. It is still not clear whether the term applied to daring experiments on matter itself, or whether it was understood to symbolize trials of the mind in discarding all forms of routine and prejudice. Doubtless it signified one or the other meaning alternately, or perhaps both at the same time.

“In alchemical treatises, the formula L'Oeuvre au Noir … designates what is said to be the most difficult phase of the alchemist's process, the separation and dissolution of substance.”

Marguerite Yourcenar book The Abyss