Quotes from Deborah Levy

In Western European realist fiction, what is a writer going to do (we wondered out loud) with the irrational, with synchronicities, with superstition and the private magic we invent to keep us out of harm's way, with the uncanny, with thought streams and digressions that contradict our attempt to fix the story?

In her view, this is because a man's love of a woman is not what gives him his self-worth. I was no longer interested in exploring this kind of dynamic in

I was thinking of Hecate at the crossroads with her burning torches and keys, Medusa with her snakes and fatal gaze, Artemis with her hunting dogs and deer, Aphrodite with her doves, Demeter with her mares, Athena with her owl. Whenever I saw eccentric and sometimes mentally fragile older women feeding pigeons on the pavement of every city in the world, I thought, Yes, there she is, she is one of those cut-down goddesses who has become demented by life.

Sometimes I would sprinkle sea salt on a wedge sour green tomato and dip it into the peppery emerald olive oil. It was as if I had struck on something good that was within my reach.

I have been making footprints in the dust and glitter of the virtual universe. It never occurred to me that, like the medusa, technology stares back and that its gaze might have petrified me, made me fearful to come down, down to Earth, where all the hard stuff happens, down to the check-out tills and the barcodes and the too many words for profit and the not enough words for pain.

Capitalism sold a flat white to me as if it were a cup of freedom.

My words were smaller than my feelings at that moment. I had spent my life finding diplomatic words. Am I a diplomat then? Isn't it hard enough to play Beethoven

There are vertical swimmers and horizontal swimmers, she said. I myself have sometimes thought I will become a vertical swimmer. No one says I have to do the third act of my life. It is always nasty. If I become ill in old age, I have not ruled it out.

Fiction is a wonderful home for the reach of the mind.

that most of us don't go through with it, but we have at least walked our minds on this forbidden pasture and let them graze there?

She had to admit he was quite handsome even though he was repulsive.

Her sad girl breath makes me dizzy.

Tears fall from his eyes and arrange themselves on his cheek like Man Ray tears.

Can we accept that language is sacred and scared and it's scarred as well, because that's how we all are?

Beautiful breath beautiful breath beautiful breath. I loved every part of her.

Her narrow silhouette and the nuggets of antique silver on her wrists fascinate and perturb him. But the little girl?He'd show the princess the back of his hand and make her yelp. The Inspector's shoes press angrily into the gravel path as he walks to his car.

The arrogance of metaphor when facts save people's lives. The succour of metaphor when facts inadequately describe people's lives.

That was the old composition and I had walked out of that world. I had literally walked off the stage.

To not feel at home in her family home is the beginning of the bigger story of society and its female discontents.

The Poet wipes her eyes on the corner of my tablecloth. 'Perhaps the modern tragedy, Lapinski, is that we weep and do not know what we are weeping for. This is quite different from catharsis.' She suddenly throws back her head and roars with laughter; her gold teeth rattle

I can see from that glint in your bleary eyes you want to light your second cigar of the evening and summon a few demons. Oh don't deny it... don't deny it... like all people who feel uncomfortable in an uncomfortable world you want to make a map. Well let me tell you it is difficult to make a map in splintered times when whole worlds and histories collide.

I love him with as much protest as I can muster.

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.

It was impossible to believe that someone did not want to be saved from their incoherence.