Life & Wisdom Quote by Georges Simenon

Simenon nails the claustrophobic paradox of modern life: the crowd doesn’t cure loneliness, it industrializes it. He starts with a shrugging statistic - “I don’t know how many millions” - and that vagueness matters. The precise number is irrelevant because the tragedy isn’t scale, it’s repetition. Multiply the same failed attempt at being understood across a metropolis, a marriage, a police interview room, and you get a civilization that can talk endlessly without ever arriving.

The phrase “complete communication” is doing heavy lifting. Simenon isn’t lamenting missed texts or awkward small talk; he’s pointing at something more ruthless: the impossibility of transmitting an inner life intact. “Complete” suggests a total handoff of experience, memory, shame, desire - the messy private weather that language can only approximate. His second “completely” reads like a bleak punchline, a stylistic trapdoor: we dream of total understanding, and the dream itself sets us up to fail.

Contextually, this is pure Simenon: the novelist of closed doors and crowded streets, of characters who confess facts but can’t confess themselves. His Maigret world runs on talk - interrogations, testimonies, gossip - yet truth stays slippery because people are opaque even to their own motives. The subtext is almost existential, but with a reporter’s eye: human isolation isn’t a poetic abstraction; it’s a daily administrative error, a constant misfiling of who we are in other people’s minds. That’s why he calls it “tragic” without melodrama. The tragedy is ordinary, and it never stops.