Quotes from Philippe Besson

Why me? He says: Because you are not like all the others, because I don't see anyone but you and you don't even realize it. He adds this phrase, which for me is unforgettable: Because you will leave and we will stay.

This is important: he sees me in a certain way, a way he will never deviate from. In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become.

I don't know then that one day I won't be seventeen. I don't know that youth doesn't last, that it's only a moment, and then it disappears and by the time you finally realize it, it's too late. It's finished, vanished, lost. There are some around me who can sense it; the adults repeat it constantly but I don't listen. Their words roll over me but don't stick. Like water off the feathers of a duck's back. I'm an idiot. An easygoing idiot.

Nothing touches me more than cracks in the armor and the person who reveals them.

I think I love him for this loneliness, that it's what pushed me toward him. I love his aloofness, his disengagement with the outside world. Such singularity moves me.

I know that Thomas consented to this single picture only because he knew (had decided) that it was our last moment together. He smiled so that I could take his smile with me.

Have you noticed how the most beautiful landscapes lose their brilliance as soon as our thoughts prevent us from seeing them properly?

I had the time to think all the way home about how affairs of the body are so much more preferable to affairs of the heart, but that sometimes you don't have the choice.

En fin de compte, l'amour n'a été possible que parce qu'il m'a vu non pas tel que j'étais, mais tel que j'allais devenir.

This feeling of love, it transports me, it makes me happy. At the same time, it consumes me and makes me miserable, the way all impossible loves are miserable.

In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become.

Always we desire too much or not enough and we compensate accordingly.

No matter how much you want to respect someone's freedom (even when you consider it selfish), you still have your own pain, anger, and melancholy to contend with.

I should be able to stay in this state of ecstasy. Or astonishment. Or let myself be overwhelmed by the incomprehensibility of it all. But the feeling that prevails the moment he disappears is that of being abandoned. Perhaps because it is already a familiar feeling.

Je me demande si la froideur des pères fait l'extrême sensibilité des fils.

He smiled so that I could take his smile with me.

I sense the ambition and ease of a generation that has grown up on a much smaller planet. Those who consider travel an ordinary adventure rather than a grand expedition, for whom a quiet life is considered a slow death. I see this child of the world and can't help but think how fate probably would have played out differently had his father been driven by the same curiosity. If he had not lived in another day. If he had known how to free himself.

Today, when I meet children on this beach, when I see them running in the dunes, or lying on the hot stone wall that was once a levee, I remember that I was like them once, with their incredible lightness and insouciance, soaking in the sun. You can never really let go of your childhood. Especially when it was happy.

Je dis : pourquoi moi ? Il dit : parce tu n'es pas du tout comme les autres, parce qu'on ne voit que toi sans que tu t'en rendes compte. Il ajoute cette phrase, pour moi inoubliable : parce que tu partiras et que nous resterons.

But we're left stunted, compromised, by the burden of having to always lie and censor ourselves.

I also know how much of yourself you have to leave behind in order to look like everyone else.

The question that imposed itself: Why me? The image doesn't fit: my thick glasses, my stretched-out blue Nordic sweater, the student head slaps, the too-good grades, the feminine gestures. Why me? He says: Because you are not like all the others, because I don't see anyone but you and you don't even realize it.

I correct myself because I've just been lying. Of course, it took time, a lot of time, before I admitted that everything was lost, before I decided to say goodbye forever. I kept hoping for a sign. I thought of initiating another meeting, I started letters that I never sent. Desire does not go out like a match, it extinguishes slowly as it burns into ash. In the end I gave up on all possibility of a reunion.)

Il me rend à la solitude. La plus profonde, celle qu'on ressent au cœur d'une foule.