Quotes from Violette Leduc

I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music. It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips.

There's no sustenance in the past.

At the age of five, of six, at the age of seven, I used to begin weeping sometimes without warning, simply for the sake of weeping, my eyes open wide to the sun, to the flowers... I wanted to feel an immense grief inside me, and it came.

To find relief in what has been, we must make ourselves eternal.

I was and I always shall be hampered by what I think other people will say.

Tu as mis au monde un fleuve de larmes, ma mère. J'ai pris le voile, ma mère.

Un ser ausente de su belleza es doblemente más bello

I was afraid of having to present my big nose to strangers.

I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music. It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips.

I give myself to adjectives body and soul, I die with pleasure for them.

She lived passionately on very little money and a great deal of curiosity, courage, and enthusiasm for books, nature, a cigarette, a bodice she was cutting out, a concert, a lecture, a fingernail file.

Her eyes were misting over, her heart was talking on her lips. To need everything when everything is finished. She no longer knew whether she was sad or whether it was hunger. To live like that, head bent forward, chin resting down near her breasts, without muscles, without sinews, without vertebrae. She smiled a martyr's smile for her own benefit: for her wretchedness was also a tenderness, and resignation is not the same as oblivion.

Drink, my angel; everything I have inside me is yours, soak it up through the paper, through the sleeve of my coat. Suck my blood out of the hollow of my elbow where you are lying, where you are keeping warm. It's just as you please, it will always be just as you please from now on.

We embraced again, we wanted to engulf each other. We had cast off our families, the world, time, certainty. Clasping her against my gaping open heart, I wanted to draw Isabelle inside. Love is an exhausting invention. Isabelle, Thérèse, I pronounced in my head, getting used to the magical simplicity of our two names.

Mon cas n'est pas unique : j'ai peur de mourir et je suis navrée d'être au monde. Je n'ai pas travaillé, je n'ai pas étudié. J'ai pleuré, j'ai crié. Les larmes et les cris m'ont pris beaucoup de temps.

I contemplated her, I was remembering her in this present, I had her beside me from last moment to last moment. When you are in love you are always on a railway platform.

Memories are comfy too, they are swaddling bands, they wrap you up warm like a mummy. What moment is there in life that is not already a memory?

My case is not unique: I am afraid of dying and distressed at being in the world.

It's incredible," she sighed. My eyebrows brushed Isabelle's eyebrows. "It's incredible the way I'm seeing you

But there was a salve for her wound: she could always die now, because she had drawn all her benefits from the apricot trees in autumn. Seeing them was her whole life compressed into an instant's dream.

No creo en el diablo. Si Dios existe no puede tener rival. El infierno es nuestra ambición del mal.

It's just as you please, it will always be just as you please from now on.

Thirty days I've been a passenger at the school. I want to live here, I want to polish my shoes in the shoe room.

I love it, it devours me. I adore it without illusions.