Quotes from Patrick Modiano

Depuis, le Paris où j'ai tenté de retrouver sa trace est demeuré aussi désert et silencieux que ce jour-là. Je marche à travers les rues vides. Pour moi, elles le restent, même le soir, à l'heure des embouteillages, quand les gens se pressent vers les bouches de métro. Je ne peux pas m'empêcher de penser à elle et de sentir un écho de sa présence dans certains quartiers.

On the sidewalk, dead leaves. Or burned pages from an old Gaffiot dictionary. It's the neighborhood of colleges and convents.

Life is completely different when you live near a railway station. It feels as if you're just passing through. Everything is temporary. One day or another, you'll hop on a train.

The more obscure and mysterious things remained, the more interested I became in them. I even looked for mystery where there was none.

Je pense à Dora Bruder. Je me dis que sa fugue n'était pas aussi simple que la mienne une vingtaine d'années plus tard, dans un monde redevenu inoffensif. Cette ville de décembre 1941, son couvre-feu, ses soldats, sa police, tout lui était hostile et voulait sa perte. A seize ans, elle avait le monde entier contre elle, sans qu'elle sache pourquoi.

And then the next fifteen years fell apart: a few blurry faces, a few vague memories, ashes...

H?n anh t?ng hi v?ng già ?i cùng cô ?y?

we had no real qualities, except the one that youth gives to everyone for a very brief time, like a big promise that will never be kept.

In those days, I thought I was happy.

And yet, from time to time, beneath this thick layer of amnesia, you can certainly sense something, an echo, distant, muted, but of what, precisely, it is impossible to say. Like finding yourself on the edge of a magnetic field, with no pendulum to pick up the radiation.

La fugue – paraît-il – est un appel au secours et quelquefois une forme de suicide. Vous éprouverez quand même un bref sentiment d'éternité. Vous n'avez pas seulement tranché les liens avec le monde, mais aussi avec le temps.

Siempre paso miedo cuando vuelvo a pie a casa a estas horas... No sé exactamente dónde estoy...» Y era cierto que había que cruzar por una tierra de nadie o más bien por una zona neutra en la que uno estaba aislado de todo.

I noticed a phenomenon that doesn't often happen to a man: several women turned round as he passed them.

Je n'étais vraiment moi–même qu'à l'instant où je m'enfuyais. Mes seuls bons souvenirs sont des souvenirs de fuite ou de fugue.

In this life that sometimes seems to be a vast, ill-defined landscape without signposts, amid all of the vanishing lines and the lost horizons, we hope to find reference points, to draw up some sort of land registry so as to shake the impression that we are navigating by chance. So we forge ties, we try to find stability in chance encounters.

Parfois, le cœur se serre à la pensée des choses qui auraient pu être et qui n'ont pas été.

Time had wiped the slate clean.

For me, the Condé was a refuge from all the drabness I anticipated in life. There will one day be a part of me—the best part—that I will be forced to leave behind there.

Existen casualidades, encuentros y coincidencias que se ignorarán siempre…

The letters dance before my eyes. Who am I?

The other day, I happened to walk through it. I had a strange sensation. Not that time had passed, but that another me, a twin, was prowling around there -- down to the smallest detail, and until the end of time -- through what I had experienced over a very short period.

There are blanks in a life, but also sometimes what they call a refrain. For periods of varying length, you don't hear this refrain, as if you've forgotten it.

I'm afraid that once you have all the answers, your life closes in on you like a trap, with the clank of keys in a prison cell. Wouldn't it be better to leave empty lots around you, into which you can escape?

People certainly lead compartmentalized lives and their friends do not know each other. It's unfortunate.