Quotes from Deborah Levy

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 has 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.

So do you anthropologists study primitive people?' 'Yes, but the only primitive person I have ever studied is myself.

He doesn't care about his own life so he doesn't care about the lives of others.

Sometimes, I find myself limping. It's as if my body remembers the way I walk with my mother. Memory is not always reliable. It is not the whole truth. Even I know that.

but the phrase about the dream being over implied that something had started and had now ended. It was up to the dreamer to say it was over, no one else could say it on their behalf.

I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalysed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it.

You have becomes used to administering your mother's medication. So perhaps it is as if you are coming off medication, too? You are using your mother like a shield to protect yourself from making a life. Medication is a ritual which I have now erased from both your lives. Attention! You will have to invent another one.

Mitt problem är att jag vill röka cigarren själv och att någon annan ska tända den åt mig. Jag vill blåsa ut röken. Som en vulkan. Som ett monster. Jag vill att det ska ryka om mig. Jag vill inte vara flickan vars jobb det är att jämra sig me gäll röst på begravningar.

Minnen är som bomber.

The face beneath the mask has to grow seamlessly into the mask.

By?am cielesno?ci?, pragnieniem, ??dz?, py?em, krwi?, sp?kanymi ustami, pokrytymi p?cherzami stopami, otartymi kolanami, st?uczonymi biodrami, lecz by?am te? szcz??liwa, ?e nie drzemi? na sofie pod kocem ze starcem u boku i dzieckiem na kolanach.

She wanted to escape from a reality that was so rational it was a little bit mad.

She is dark. He is fair. She comes from there. He comes from here. They like each other. It is an easy and lovely lust ...

I had broken the rules of exchange. She had given and I had taken, but I had not reciprocated. A gift like love is never free.

A life without swimming every day was not a life I wanted.

Mother was The Woman the whole world had imagined to death. It proved very hard to re-negotiate the world's nostalgic phantasy about our purpose in life...we did not yet entirely understand that Mother, as imagined and politicized by the societal system, was a delusion.

I pursue my case, Monsieur, I speak English, Italian and German, and I want justice in all three languages. I have been damaged by unlove. It makes at inappropriate moments when I should be dignified.

Julieta looks at me, and then she laughs. 'Your boundaries are made from sand, Sofia.' 'Yes,' I say. 'I know that.

It is a disappointment to me to spawn a child who feels so deeply. I would like to refute the idea that to feel somehow makes you a better person.

My mother's words are my mirror. My laptop is my veil of shame. I hide in it all the time.

Kitty stared at the sky smashing against the mountains.

He glanced drowsily at Laura and Mitchell eating their strawberries in the sunshine and found himself about to fall asleep. It was an odd sensation, 'to find himself' about to fall into sleep. As if he could find himself anywhere at any time.

She was not ready to go home and start imitating someone she used to be.

To do the things she had chosen to do in the world, she risked forfeiting her place as a wife and mother, a bewildering place haunted by all that had been imagined for her if she chose to sit in it.