Quotes from Deborah Levy

I confess that I am often lost in all the dimensions of time, that the past sometimes feels nearer than the present and I often fear the future has already happened.

Be sure to enjoy language, experiment with ways of talking, be exuberant even when you don't feel like it because language can make your world a better place to live.

She was not a poet. She was a poem.

I am not okay. Not at all and haven't been for some time. I did not tell her how discouraged I felt and that I was ashamed I was not more resilient and all the rest of it which included wanting a bigger life but that so far I had not been bold enough to make a bid for things I wanted to happen and I feared it was written in the stars that I might end up with a reduced life like hers...

Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realize we don't want to hold it together.

Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll all get home safely. But you tried and you did not get home safely. You did not get home at all.

I will never stop grieving for my long-held wish for enduring love that does not reduce its major players to something less than they are.

To become a WRITER I had to learn to INTERRUPT, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then LOUDER, and then to just speak in my own voice which is NOT LOUD AT ALL.

Sometimes we want to unbelong as much as we want to belong.

As much as I try to make the past keep still and mind its manners, it moves and murmurs with me through every day.

My love for my mother is like an axe. It cuts very deep.

When happiness is happening it feels as if nothing else happened before it, it is a sensation that happens only in the present tense.

to be forceful was not the same as being powerful and to be gentle was not the same as being fragile...

Anything covered is always interesting. There is never nothing beneath something that is covered.

It is dishonest to give me a poem and pretend to want my opinion when what you really want are reasons to live.

We have to mourn our dead, but we cannot let them take over our life.

I have been waiting on her all my life. I was the waitress. Waiting on her and waiting for her. What was I waiting for? Waiting for her to step into her self or step out of her invalid self. Waiting for her to take the voyage out of her gloom, to buy a ticket to a vital life.

It was not that easy to convey to him, a man much older than she was, that the world was her world, too. He had taken a risk when he invited her to join him at his table. After all, she came with a whole life and libido of her own. It had not occurred to him that she might not consider herself to be the minor character and him the major character. In this sense, she had unsettled a boundary, collapsed a social hierarchy, broken with the usual rules.

Yes, there had been many times I called my daughters back to zip up their coats. All the same, I knew they would rather be cold and free.

Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.

I was flesh thirst desire dust blood lips cracking feet blistered knees skinned hips bruised, but I was so happy not to be napping on a sofa under a blanket with an older man by my side and a baby on my lap.

My problem is that I want to smoke the cigar and for someone else to light it. I want to blow out smoke. Like a volcano. Like a monster. I want to fume. I do not want to be the girl whose job it is to wail in a high-pitched voice at funerals.

I have never got a grip on when the past begins or where it ends, but if cities map the past with statues made from bronze forever frozen in one dignified position, as much as I try to make the past keep still and mind its manners, it moves and murmurs with me through every day.

It would take a while for me not to think of the Greek language as the father who walked out on me