You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they’re simply unbearable.
Don’t be afraid anymore. Not of anyone. Not of anything. Nothing. Ever again. Listen to me: not ever again.
The woman is the home. That’s where she used to be, and that’s where she still is. You might ask me, What if a man tries to be part of the home — will the woman let him? I answer yes. Because the he becomes one of the children.
The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.
Writing was the only thing that populated my life and made it magic.
You think of outside your room, of the streets of the town, the lonely little squares over by the station, of those winter Saturdays all alike.
I often think of the image only I can see now, and of which I’ve never spoken. It’s always there, in the same silence, amazing. It’s the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight
You didn’t have to attract desire. Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didn’t exist. Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been.
You ask: Why is the malady of death fatal? She answers: Because whoever has it doesn’t know he’s a carrier, of death. And also because he’s like to die without any life to die to, and without evn knowing that’s what he’s doing.
…as long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn’t happened.
When it’s in a book I don’t think it’ll hurt any more …exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them.
He says he’s lonely, horribly lonely because of this love he feels for her. She says she’s lonely too. She doesn’t say why.
Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we’ve ever met.
Paradoxically, the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognize
The house a woman creates is a Utopia. She can’t help it – can’t help trying to interest her nearest and dearest not in happiness itself but in the search for it.