Life & Wisdom Quote by Georges Simenon

"It was night and I could see a large and calm lake, reflecting the moon. Black mountains rose around it. I arrived from between two of these mountains, I looked at the lake and the moon, and that was it, nothing else happened"

Georges Simenon, Writer

About this Quote

Simenon knows how to make “nothing happens” feel like a confession. The scene is stripped to its barest geometry: lake, moon, mountains, arrival. No adjectives beyond “large and calm,” no psychology beyond the fact of looking. That restraint is the point. He’s writing in the register of a man who has stopped expecting plot to rescue him, and who is quietly stunned by how complete the world can feel when it refuses to provide an event.

The sentence structure does the heavy lifting. It moves with procedural calm - “I could see… I arrived… I looked…” - like a police report filed by someone who has run out of theories. Then Simenon snaps the rhythm with that blunt landing: “and that was it.” It’s anti-climax as aesthetic choice, a refusal of the novelist’s usual bargain where atmosphere pays out in revelation. Here the atmosphere is the revelation.

Subtextually, the lake’s reflection is a mirror that offers only surface: the moon is present, but only as an image. The mountains “rose around it” like a closed argument, a natural enclosure that makes the narrator’s entrance feel fated and insignificant. Coming “from between two of these mountains” reads like passage through a threshold - not into adventure, but into a mood: a pocket of silence where meaning isn’t discovered, it’s suspended.

Context matters because Simenon’s genius, in the Maigret books and the romans durs alike, is his distrust of melodrama. He’s fascinated by the ordinary moment when the mind wants a story and reality gives it weather, light, and stillness. The line isn’t an absence of content; it’s a quiet indictment of our need for one.

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About the Author

Georges Simenon (February 13, 1903 - September 4, 1989) was a Writer from Belgium.

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