Le Petit Soldat Quotes

Bruno Forestier: Photography is truth...and cinema is truth 24 times a second.

Bruno Forestier: There's a very beautiful quote. Who said it? I think it was Lenin. "Ethics are the aesthetics of the future." I think that's very beautiful and very moving. It reconciles the right and the left.

Bruno Forestier: Maybe men talk incessantly, as if searching for gold in their quest for the truth. But instead of digging in riverbeds, they dig deep in their thoughts. They cast aside all the worthless words and they end up with just one, one single golden word: silence.

Bruno Forestier: I don't know. Life says women are right. But gives death to men. Death is what's important. Van Gogh once said that death would take us to another star.

Bruno Forestier: What do people on the Right and Left think? What's the point of revolution today? The Right wins and then applies Leftist policies and vice versa. I win or lose, but I fight alone.

Bruno Forestier: I'm very proud to be French. But I'm also against nationalism. One defends ideas, not territories. I love France because I love Joachim du Bellay and Louis Aragon. I love Germany because I love Beethoven. I con't love Barcelona because of Spain. I love Spain because a city like Barcelona exists and America because I love American cars.

Bruno Forestier: The dark-blue sky reminded me of that Klee painting. "Where did you come from? Where are you? Where are you going?"

Bruno Forestier: The first time I met her she looked right out of a play by Jean Giraudoux.

Bruno Forestier: Sometimes I feel Iike I've wasted my time. Veronica - were her eyes Velázquez-gray or Renoir-gray?

Bruno Forestier: "O month of flowers and metamorphosis, I'll never forget the lilacs or the rose." Why was I obsessed with that poem?

Bruno Forestier: Even a soldier can't be forced to kill.

Bruno Forestier: I felt the important thing in life was not to be defeated.

Chauffeur: The Swiss have never been very courageous. Just look how they drive. They even signal to pass a cyclist. It's infuriating!

Bruno Forestier: I drove around. The city silhouetted against the starry night sky is always very moving, both hard-edged and mysterious, in the image of mankind and what lies beyond mankind.

Bruno Forestier: A foreign woman speaking French is always lovely.

Bruno Forestier: Veronica's charm was all her own: the curve of her shoulders, the worry in her eyes, the secret in her smile.

Bruno Forestier: What's important isn't how others see you, but how you see yourself.

Bruno Forestier: I used this often with women. They love it when you call them "little girl" and suggest children's games.

Bruno Forestier: Veronica and I talked about art. She said Van Gogh was a lesser painter than Gauguin, which isn't true, of course.

Veronica Dreyer: Snapshots taken around the world pass before me like a bad dream. Panama. Rome. Alexandria. Budapest. Paris. The bad dream continues. "We went off to war like schoolboys to school." So began one Bernano's novels. I remember the title: Humiliated Children. I relit my cigarette. I feel like one of those schoolboys this morning. Why? Perhaps asking questions is more important than coming up with answers.

Bruno Forestier: I've become a coward. It's strange. When I look at my own face, it's like it doesn't match who I feel I am from inside.

Bruno Forestier: A woman's shoulders are very pretty and noble.

Bruno Forestier: A great feeling of loneliness flooded over me.

Bruno Forestier: Maybe remorse is the beginning of freedom.

Veronica Dreyer: I'm going to take a bath.

Bruno Forestier: I wondered if I was happy to feel free or free to feel happy.

Jacques: [on the phone with Bruno] Better be careful, big boy. That's right. Tragedy today is politics. No, Napoleon said that, not me.

Bruno Forestier: I watched her sit down. I love the way she lights a cigarette.

Veronica Dreyer: I could see that the French were wrong. The other side has an ideal, but the French don't. It's very important to have an ideal.

Bruno Forestier: It's terrible today. If you just calmly do nothing, you get hell precisely for doing nothing. So, we do things without conviction. And it's a pity to wage war without conviction.

Bruno Forestier: Why is the Vatican anticommunist? Funny guy, the Pope. They believe in the same thing. All men are brothers.

Bruno Forestier: She looked at me. In my opinion, women should never pass 25.

Bruno Forestier: Men grow more attractive as they age, but not women. I think it's extraordinarily unfair for a woman to age.

Bruno Forestier: I'm lost unless I pretend to be lost.

Bruno Forestier: Maybe that's the important thing: to come to recognize the sound of your own voice and the shape of your own face.

Bruno Forestier: People look at me but don't know what I'm thinking and they'll never know. Right this moment: a forest in Germany. A bicycle ride. That's gone now. Now - the terrace of a cafe in Barcelona. Now - that's gone. I try to trap my own thoughts.

Bruno Forestier: Where does speech come from? Maybe people talk on and on like gold prospectors - to find the truth. But instead of dredging in a river, they dredge among their own thoughts. They eliminate all the words of no value - and end up finding just one. But a single word by itself - is already silence.

Jacques: A girl all alone in the life is either a whore or an informer.