Daniel Pennac Quotes

Who are you?" I asked. "You know who I am," he replied. "I'm yours." ~Clea / Sage, pg. 105

No one owns anything. Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realize that nothing really belongs to them. And if nothing belongs to me, then there's no point wasting my time looking after things that aren't mine.

How folks lay claim to a loved one is they give you a name of their own. They figure to label you as their property.

Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.

The sunflower is mine, in a way.

Despite the fact that I spend a lot of time in London, Switzerland and New York, Africa is the place I know and love best, and my heart will always lie here.

What belongs to someone, belongs to someone.

You can never lose anything that really belongs to you, and you can't keep that which belongs to someone else.

If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it was, and always will be yours. If it never returns, it was never yours to begin with.

Listen to me. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what any of this means. But I know this much. It doesn’t matter. You’re not one of them. You never were. You’re not theirs. You’re mine.

If you love something let it go.. if it comes back its yours

Poor slob without a name. It's a little inconvenient, his not having a name. But I haven't the right to give him one: he'll have to wait until he belongs to somebody. We just sort of took up by the river one day, we don't belong to each other: he's an independent, and so am I. I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together.

It is only by loving a thing that you can make it yours.

When I'm in New York I look at the Empire State Building and feel as though it belongs to me ... or is it vice versa?

I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

Construed as turf, home just seems a provisional claim, a designation you make upon a place, not one it makes on you. A certain set of buildings, a glimpsed, smudged window-view across a schoolyard, a musty aroma sniffed behind a garage when you were a child, all of which come crowding in upon your latter-day senses -- those are pungent things and vivid, even consoling. But to me they are also inert and nostalgic and unlikely to connect you to the real, to that essence art can sometimes achieve, which is permanence.

You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

(Home) is you in things.

Are you really going to catch us and take us back to Esther? We don’t belong to her, you know.” Embarrassed, Victor stared at his shoes. “Well, children all have to belong to somebody,” he muttered. “Do you belong to someone?” “That’s different.” “Because you’re a grown-up?

I don't even remember the season. I just remember walking between them and feeling for the first time that I belonged somewhere.

Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.

Where you are is who you are. The further inside you the place moves, the more your identity is intertwined with it. Never casual, the choice of place is the choice of something you crave.

... for home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children.

Locale is both a geographic term and the inner sense of being.

Eventually, a collection ceases to be a personal indulgence and assumes its own identity. In fact, it becomes a thing in its own right - rather like Frankenstein's monster.