Quotes from Irene Nemirovsky

music alone can abolish differences of language or culture between two people and evoke something indestructible within them.

How sad the world is, so beautiful yet so absurd.

Evil is visible, it burns, it smugly displays itself for all to see.

An enemy soldier never seemed to be alone--one human being like any other--but followed, crushed from all directions by innumerable ghosts, the missing and the dead. Speaking to him wasn't like speaking to a solitary man but to an invisible multitude; nothing that was said was either spoken or heard with simplicity: there was always that strange sensation of being no more than lips that spoke for so many others, others who had been silenced.

Mothers and women in love: both ferocious females.

Men who loved you when you were twenty, and who continue to see you the way you looked then are impossible to replace.

Un soldato nemico non era mai solo - un essere umano di fronte a un altro - ma portava con sé una folla innumerevole di fantasmi, i fantasmi degli assenti e dei morti. Non ci si rivolgeva a un uomo ma a una moltitudine invisibile; così nessuna delle parole pronunciate era detta semplicemente e come tale ascoltata; si aveva sempre la strana sensazione che a parlare fosse soltanto una bocca, che parlava per tante altre, mute.

After the calm comes the storm; it starts out slowly, reaches its peak, then it's over and other periods of calm, some longer, some shorter, come along. It's just been our bad luck to be born in a century full of storms, that's all. They'll die down.

Anything was better than music, for music alone can abolish differences of language or culture between two people and evoke something indestructible within them.

Every so often something came to life inside her, rebelled, demanded noise, movement, people. Life, my God, life! How long would this war go on? How many years would they have to live like this, in this dismal lethargy, bowed, docile, crushed like cattle in a storm?

How tolerable misfortunes appear when they affect only other people! How strong the human body seems when it's another man's flesh that bleeds! How easy it is to look death in the face when it's another man's turn!

Dopo tutto, si giudicano gli altri solo in base al proprio cuore: l'avaro vede sempre la gente spinta dall'interesse, il lussurioso dall'ossessione del desiderio.

En el fondo, seguía siendo, y siempre sería, una niña tímida que sólo se sentía a gusto en una soledad montaraz.

When you love someone as much as that, you don't believe they can die. You think your love protects them. Even if he doesn't come back, even if he gets lost in the snow or is hit by a stray bullet, she'll wait for him.

Where do we find happiness? We pursue it, search for it, kill ourselves trying to find it, and all the time it's just here...It comes just when we've stopped expecting anything, stopped hoping, stopped being afraid.

No one quite knew why, but they felt light-hearted. Maybe it was because of the beautiful weather. The sky, so blue, seemed gently to bow down towards the horizon and caress the earth.

Quite apart from the fact that we usually pay so dearly for our follies, we should be generous about them, to ourselves and others. Yes, we always pay for them, and sometimes the smallest indiscretions cost as much as the largest.

Che cosa vuoi capire? Non c'è niente da capire, le rispose cercando di calmarla. Ci sono leggi che regolano il mondo e che non sono fatte né per noi né contro di noi. Quando scoppia il temporale, sai che il fulmine è il prodotto di due scariche elettriche opposte, le nuvole non sanno nulla di te. Non puoi prendertela con loro. Inoltre sarebbe ridicolo, non possono capirti.

Barna står ved kirkeporten. Gå og hent dem der. De som har mistet barna sine, kan gå og hente dem ved kirken.

Then a dark shape would glide across the star-covered sky, everyone would look up and the laughter would stop. It wasn't exactly what you'd call fear, rather a strange sadness--a sadness that had nothing human about it any more, for it lacked both courage and hope. This was how animals waited to die. It was the way fish caught in a net watch the shadow of the fisherman moving back and forth above them.

And besides, in the end, perhaps love demands marble palaces, white peacocks and swans.

No matter how hard they tried, they could never take all their memories with them: the best memories would remain here, between these thin walls.

But Hubert had serious doubts about religion and Philippe was far away. The outside world was incoherent and hideous, painted in the colours of hell, a hell Jesus never could enter, Hubert thought, "because they would tear him to pieces.

She was too exhausted and downcast to take in the importance of the news- just as a person who has shed so many tears at the bedside of someone who is dying has none left for the actual moment of death.