Quotes from Deborah Levy

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

I realized my mother had charm and verve. If I blew on her name, ROSE, the letters would shuffle around and come out as EROS, the god of love, winged but lame.

I felt at ease with myself, which must have meant that she did not regard me as strange and so I had no reason to imitate someone who was less strange and had been saved from doing the chameleon thing.

If I see myself as an unwilling detective with a desire for justice, does that make her illness an unsolved crime? If so, who is the villain and who is the victim? Attempting to decipher her aches and pains, their triggers

We Germans invented all the big movements of the twentieth century. Phenomenology from Heidegger and Hegel, communism from Marx and Engels. So you will have to excuse us for being a little stiff in our limbs – we have been busy.

It was hard to accept that the first man in my life would do things that were to my disadvantage if they were to his advantage. Yet it was a revelation that somehow set me free.

British literary landscape,

He did not ask me one single question, not even my name. It seemed that what he needed was a devoted, enchanting woman at his side to acquire his canapes for him and who understood that he was entirely the subject.

I wasn't in the mood to talk. The mournful sound of the rubber wheels of the tea trolley squeaking on the lino floor was the right soundtrack for the end of the world. Sometimes the tea lady lost her grip and the trolley hit the corners of the walls and beds. It was the equivalent of waterfalls and parrots in my new terrible world.

I wanted to die of shame but everyone insisted on keeping me alive. I had to live.

A female writer cannot afford to feel her life too clearly. If she does, she will write in a rage when she should write calmly.

The moody politics of the moderns home had become complicated and confusing. There were many modern and apparently powerful women I knew who had made a home for everyone else, but did not feel at home in their family home.

They are spirits from a dying world knotting our hair in sleep we worked hard to buy.

I knew I wanted to be a writer more than anything else in the world, but I was overwhelmed by everything and didn't know where to start.

at that moment the girl thinks she can see twenty red parrots, wings on fire, fly into the sun, and the boy thinks he can see a rhino poke its horn through the moon

I am upset today, Lapinski, because my friend is dying... I spread my loneliness out like a fan in front of you. He is my comrade, Lapinski. Holding on to the hands of the clock with his fingertips. For me. We hang on for each other.

To unfold any number of ideas through all the dimensions of time is the great adventure of the writing life.

When a female writer walks a female character in to the centre of her literary enquiry (or a forest) and this character starts to project shadow and light all over the place, she will have to find a language that is in part to do with learning how to become a subject rather than a delusion, and in part to do with unknotting the ways in which she has been put together by the societal system in the first place.

The writing life is mostly about stamina. To get to the finishing line requires the writing to become more interesting than everyday life...

Cuando una mujer tiene que encontrar una forma nueva de vivir y rompe con la historia social que ha borrado su nombre, se espera que se odie a sí misma atrozmente, que enloquezca de dolor, que llore arrepentida. Son las joyas reservadas para ella en la corona del patriarcado, siempre a su disposición. No faltan las lágrimas, pero es mejor atravesar la oscuridad negra y azulada que quedarse con esas joyas que nada valen

J.K. watches a storm rage into the crimson afternoon. The sky is electric. Rain whips her bare arms and legs. Dustbins are hauled into the air, caught on the wind's curve. Bags and pillowcase unpacked for a while, toothbrush, perfume, books, a little pile of yellow feathers, J.K. knows she too is caught in the wind. She is Europe's eerie child, and she is part of the storm." (from "Swallowing Geography" by Deborah Levy)

She was not a poet. She was a poem. She was about to snap in half. He thought his own poetry had made her la la la la love him. It was unbearable.

One of these men told me at a book festival that if he did not transgress too many boundaries in his marriage, there would always be a comforting pair of slippers warming for him by the fire...Will there ever be a comforting pair of slippers (pink, feathered) warming for me by the egg-shaped fireplace? Not unless I became a female character in a vintage Hollywood movie and paid a housekeeper to put them there.

There is a spectre inside every photograph.