Deborah Levy Quotes

#1. In the new quiet I heard the sea as if my ears were laid against the ocean floor. I could hear everything. The rumbling earthquake of a ship and spider crabs moving between weeds.

Deborah Levy

#2. To use the language of a war correspondent, which was, she knew, what Isabel Jacobs happened to be, she would have to say thay Kitty Finch was smiling at her with hostile intent.

Deborah Levy

#3. History is the dark magician inside us, tearing at our liver. (Deborah Levy, Hot Milk, p. 185)

Deborah Levy

#4. I want to be master of my own fuck-ups.

Deborah Levy

#5. play with whatever the day brought in.

Deborah Levy

#6. I have always wanted to go to Trieste because it sounds like tristesse, which is a light-hearted word, even though in French it means sadness. In Spanish it is tristeza, which is heavier than French sadness, more of a groan than a whisper.

Deborah Levy

#7. She is dark. He is fair. She comes from there. He comes from here. They like each other. It is an easy and lovely lust ...

Deborah Levy

#8. I realised that the question I had asked myself while writing this book [Swimming Home] was (as surgeons say) very close to the bone: 'What do we do with knowledge that we cannot bear to live with? What do we do with the things we do not want to know?'

Deborah Levy

#9. We are East & West looting each other.

Deborah Levy

#10. As much as I try to make the past keep still and mind its manners, it moves and murmurs with me through every day.

Deborah Levy

#11. We're kissing in the rain.' Her voice was hard and soft at the same time. Like the velvet armchairs. Like the black rain inked on his hand.

Deborah Levy

#12. The young woman was a window waiting to be climbed through. A window that she guessed was a little broken anyway.

Deborah Levy

#13. Has anyone ever actually told you how up yourself you are?

Deborah Levy

#14. They would be enchanted beginners all over again, ... That was the best thing to be in life.

Deborah Levy

#15. Next year he would suggest they hire a chalet on the edge of an icy fjord in Norway, as far away from the Jacobs family as possible.

Deborah Levy

#16. He bought her a bottle of lime pickle which seems to me a very intimate thing to do; it suggests he knows what she likes to taste.

Deborah Levy

#17. To become a WRITER I had to learn to INTERRUPT, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then LOUDER, and then to just speak in my own voice which is NOT LOUD AT ALL.

Deborah Levy

#18. We have to mourn our dead, but we cannot let them take over our life.

Deborah Levy

#19. I have researched aboriginal culture, Mayan hieroglyphics and the corporate culture of a Japanese car manufacturer, and I have written essays on the internal logic of various other societies, but I haven't a clue about my own logic.

Deborah Levy

#20. It is dishonest to give me a poem and pretend to want my opinion when what you really want are reasons to live.

Deborah Levy

#21. This was the rearranged space of yesterday.

Deborah Levy

#22. I have been waiting on her all my life. I was the waitress. Waiting on her and waiting for her. What was I waiting for? Waiting for her to step into her self or step out of her invalid self. Waiting for her to take the voyage out of her gloom, to buy a ticket to a vital life.

Deborah Levy

#23. She was not a poet. She was a poem.

Deborah Levy

#24. The truth was her husband had the final word because he wrote words and then he put full stops at the end of them. She knew this, but what did his wife know?

Deborah Levy

#25. 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.

Deborah Levy

#26. She was not a poet. She was a poem. She was about to snap in half. He thought his own poetry had made her la la la la love him. It was unbearable.

Deborah Levy

#27. We are East & West looting each other.

Deborah Levy

#28. My love for my mother is like an axe. It cuts very deep.

Deborah Levy

#29. How do we set about not imagining something?

Deborah Levy

#30. When happiness is happening it feels as if nothing else happened before it, it is a sensation that happens only in the present tense.

Deborah Levy

#31. Afterwards, I will have to tie the trees to bamboo poles so the wind will not determine their shape. A tree cannot be given form by the vagaries of the wind.

Deborah Levy

#32. Life ia only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll al get home safely.

Deborah Levy

#33. I confess that I am often lost in all the dimensions of time, that the past sometimes feels nearer than the present and I often fear the future has already happened.

Deborah Levy

#34. It is a disappointment to me to spawn a child who feels so deeply. I would like to refute the idea that to feel somehow makes you a better person.

Deborah Levy

#35. To be forceful was not the same as being powerful and to be gentle was not the same as being fragile ...

Deborah Levy

#36. I was flesh thirst desire dust blood lips cracking feet blistered knees skinned hips bruised, but I was so happy not to be napping on a sofa under a blanket with an older man by my side and a baby on my lap.

Deborah Levy

#37. We have travelled a long distance from the cow with a bucket of raw milk under its udder. We are a long way from home.' This

Deborah Levy

#38. It smelt of coconut ice cream and sweat and the Mediterranean sea. I

Deborah Levy

#39. It would take a while for me not to think of the Greek language as the father who walked out on me

Deborah Levy

#40. Her taste for symmetry and structure, it helped her thoughts drift. Symmetry did not chain her, it set her free. (p. 85)

Deborah Levy

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

Deborah Levy

#42. Anything covered is always interesting. There is never nothing beneath something that is covered.

Deborah Levy

#43. Yes, there had been many times I called my daughters back to zip up their coats. All the same, I knew they would rather be cold and free.

Deborah Levy

#44. Time has shattered, it's cracked like my lips.

Deborah Levy

#45. Be sure to enjoy language, experiment with ways of talking, be exuberant even when you don't feel like it because language can make your world a better place to live.

Deborah Levy

#46. My problem is that I want to smoke the cigar and for someone else to light it. I want to blow out smoke. Like a volcano. Like a monster. I want to fume. I do not want to be the girl whose job it is to wail in a high-pitched voice at funerals.

Deborah Levy

#47. 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.

Deborah Levy

#48. The unloved watch the loved perform the small rituals of their loving.

Deborah Levy

#49. I pursue my case, Monsieur, I speak English, Italian and German, and I want justice in all three languages. I have been damaged by unlove. It makes at inappropriate moments when I should be dignified.

Deborah Levy

#50. It is not enough to feel love. More important is how we express love.

Deborah Levy