Quotes from Deborah Levy

The young woman was a window waiting to be climbed through. A window that she guessed was a little broken anyway.

I have always wanted to go to Trieste because it sounds like tristesse, which is a light-hearted word, even though in French it means sadness. In Spanish it is tristeza, which is heavier than French sadness, more of a groan than a whisper.

we do not have to conform to the way our life has been written for us, especially by those who are less imaginative than ourselves.

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 an 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....

It's hard to write and be open and let things in when life is tough, but to keep everything out means there's nothing to work with.

As Simone de Beauvoir had told us, women are not supposed to eclipse men in a world in which success and power are marked out for them. It is not easy to take up the historic privilege of dominance over women... if he is economically dependent on her talents. At the same time, she receives the fatal message that she must conceal her talents and abilities in order to be loved by him.

What is a sigh? That would be another good subject for a field study. Is it just a long, deep, audible exhalation of breath? Rose's sigh was intense but not subdued. It was frustrated but not yet sad. A sigh resets the respiratory system so it was possible that my mother had been holding her breath, which suggests she was more nervous than she appeared to be. A sigh is an emotional response to being set a difficult task.

How do we set about not imagining something?

Smoking cheap Spanish filthy sock-tobacco under a pine tree was so much better than trying to hold it together on escalators. There was something comforting about being literally lost when I was lost in every other way...

This was the rearranged space of yesterday.

We're kissing in the rain.' Her voice was hard and soft at the same time. Like the velvet armchairs. Like the black rain inked on his hand.

The fact that lipstick and mascara and eye shadow were called 'Make Up' thrilled me. Everywhere in the world there were made up people and most of them were women.

I had energy because I had no choice but to have energy. I had to write to support my children and I had to do all the heavy lifting. Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.

Life ia only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll al get home safely.

History is the dark magician inside us, tearing at our liver. (Deborah Levy, Hot Milk, p. 185)

In the new quiet I heard the sea as if my ears were laid against the ocean floor. I could hear everything. The rumbling earthquake of a ship and spider crabs moving between weeds.

After Duras wrote Lol Stein, she made a curious remark - she said that she gave herself permission to speak 'in a sense totally alien to women'. I know what she means. It is so hard to claim our desires and so much more relaxing to mock them.

She knew she never wanted children or to serve his breakfast or run his errands or pretend she was not intellectually engaged with the world to make herself more loveable to him.

It was true that I had no idea how to endure being alive and everything that comes with it.

Time has shattered, it's cracked like my lips.

That night, in the deep heat of Greece, devoured by mosquitoes and reminiscences, I was thinking about all the doors I had closed in my life and what it would have taken to keep them ajar.

Her taste for symmetry and structure, it helped her thoughts drift. Symmetry did not chain her, it set her free. (p. 85)

We did not yet entirely understand that Mother, as imagined and politicized by the Societal System, was a delusion. The world loved the delusion more than it loved the mother.

In fact I would be content to live in a humble wooden cabin on the edge of an ocean or a lake, but somehow I looked down on myself for not having a bigger dream.