Quotes from Deborah Levy

I can't stand THE DEPRESSED. It's like a job, it's the only thing they work hard at.

play with whatever the day brought in.

They would be enchanted beginners all over again, ... . That was the best thing to be in life.

When our father does the things he needs to do in the world, we understand it is his due. If our mother does the things she needs to do in the world, we feel she had abandoned us. It is a miracle she survives our mixed messages, written in society's most poisoned ink. It is enough to drive her mad.

Couples were always keen to return to the task of trying to destroy their lifelong partners while pretending to have their best interests at heart.

It is so mysterious to want to suppress women. It is even more mysterious when women want to suppress women. I can only think we are so very powerful that we need to be suppressed all the time.

It seemed that acquiring a house was not the same thing as acquiring a home. And connected to home was a question I swatted away every time it landed too near me. Who else was living with me in the grand old house with the pomegranate tree? Was I alone with the melancholy fountain for company? No. There was definitely someone else there with me, perhaps even cooling their feet in that fountain. Who was this person? A phantom.

Empathy is more painful than medusa stings.

Has anyone ever actually told you how up yourself you are?

I have researched aboriginal culture, Mayan hieroglyphics and the corporate culture of a Japanese car manufacturer, and I have written essays on the internal logic of various other societies, but I haven't a clue about my own logic.

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be

It was not that easy to convey to him, a man much older than she was, that the world was her world too.

What is worse? To be chained all day with a bowl of water, or to be free and die of thirst?

I want to get away from the kinship structures that are supposed to hold me together. To mess up the story I have been told about myself. To hold the story upside down by its tail.

You are history

The story in this book was about a woman who has gifted her life to a man. This is not something to be tried at home but it is usually where it happens.

Gómez had suggested I steal a fish to achieve more courage and purpose. I regarded this task as an anthropological experiment, though it crossed a border into something approaching magic, or perhaps magical thinking. When I googled how to gut a fish, there were over 9 million results.

I was also searching for a house in which I could live and work and make a world at my own pace, but even in my imagination this home was blurred, undefined, not real, or not realistic, or lacked realism.

she had gone too far into the unhappiness of the world to start all over again.

To unfold any number of ideas through all the dimensions of time is the great adventure of the writing life. But I had nowhere to write.

Next year he would suggest they hire a chalet on the edge of an icy fjord in Norway, as far away from the Jacobs family as possible.

It smelt of coconut ice cream and sweat and the Mediterranean sea. I

We have travelled a long distance from the cow with a bucket of raw milk under its udder. We are a long way from home.' This

The unloved watch the loved perform the small rituals of their loving.