Top 36 Irene Nemirovsky Quotes
#1. Men who loved you when you were twenty, and who continue to see you the way you looked then are impossible to replace.
Irene Nemirovsky
#2. Such madness. When you're 20, love is like a fever. It makes you almost delirious. When it's over, you can hardly remember how it happened. Fire in the blood, how quickly it burns out.
Irene Nemirovsky
#3. The way a man drinks in company tells you nothing about him, but the way he drinks when alone reveals, without his realizing it, the very depths of his soul.
Irene Nemirovsky
#5. All the light of the day, fleeing the earth, seemed for one brief moment to take refuge in the sky; pink clouds spiralled round the full moon that was as green as pistachio sorbet and as clear as glass; it was reflected in the lake.
Irene Nemirovsky
#6. When you're twenty, love is like a fever, it makes you almost delirious. When it's over you can hardly remember how it happened ... Fire in the blood, how quickly it burns itself out.
Irene Nemirovsky
#7. Because all happiness is contagious, and disarms the spirit of hatred.
Irene Nemirovsky
#8. And besides, in the end, perhaps love demands marble palaces, white peacocks and swans.
Irene Nemirovsky
#9. 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.
Irene Nemirovsky
#10. My God! What is this country doing to me? Because it has rejected me, let us consider it coldly, let us watch it lose the honour and its life.
Irene Nemirovsky
#11. For there comes a time in life when the pity previously reserved only for children takes on a different form, a time when we study the faces of 'old people' and sense that one day we will be just like them. And that is the moment when early childhood comes to an end.
Irene Nemirovsky
#12. Evil is visible, it burns, it smugly displays itself for all to see.
Irene Nemirovsky
#13. After all, people judge one another according to their own feelings. It is only the miser who sees other enticed by money, the lustful who see others obsessed by desire.
Irene Nemirovsky
#15. 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.
Irene Nemirovsky
#16. He hated the war; it threatened much more than his lifestyle or peace of mind. It continually destroyed the world of the imagination, the only world where he felt happy.
Irene Nemirovsky
#17. Her grandfather's books [ ... ] opened before Ada, a world whose colours were so dazzling that reality paled in comparison and faded away. Boris Godunov, Satan, Athalia, King Lear: they all spoke words charged with meaning; every syllable was inexpressively precious
Irene Nemirovsky
#19. The sun was shining with the kind of brilliant, silvery light you sometimes find in the middle of a truly beautiful day; an almost imperceptible iridescent mist hovered in the air and all the fresh colours of June were intensified, looked richer and softer, as if reflected through a prism.
Irene Nemirovsky
#20. 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!
Irene Nemirovsky
#21. The tender June day persisted, refusing to die. Each pulse of light was fainter and more exquisite than the last, as if bidding farewell to the earth, full of love and regret.
Irene Nemirovsky
#22. For music alone can abolish differences
of language or culture between two people and invoke something indestructible within them.
Irene Nemirovsky
#23. And aren't the most beautiful follies the ones linked to love?
Irene Nemirovsky
#24. 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.
Irene Nemirovsky
#25. She was approaching the hardest moment to be faced when separated from the one you love, the moment when you finally get used to your pain, and then, you are only half alive, because that pain meant you were still fully alive. It was a bleeding, gasping kind of life.
Irene Nemirovsky
#26. Believe me, my boy, women don't love a man for himself but as a weapon against other women.
Irene Nemirovsky
#27. 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.
Irene Nemirovsky
#28. When you love someone as much as that, you don't believe they can die. You think your love protects them.
Irene Nemirovsky
#29. She cried because prejudice outlives passion and because she was sentimentally patriotic.
Irene Nemirovsky
#30. Love is just a peculiar, fleeting affair that isn't very important, but in marriage there is always hostility between two different tribes of human beings. There are two opposing forces, who fight each other until one of them wins, and you and I, my poor old Alain, have been knocked out too easily.
Irene Nemirovsky
#32. Christian charity, the compassion of centuries of civilization, fell from her like useless ornaments, revealing her bare, arid soul. She needed to feed and protect her children. Nothing else mattered any more.
Irene Nemirovsky
#33. What separates or unites people is not their language, their laws, their customs, their principles, but the way they hold their knife and fork.
Irene Nemirovsky
#34. But why are we always the ones who have to suffer?" she cried out in indignation. "Us and people like us? Ordinary people, the lower middle classes.
Irene Nemirovsky
#35. When I was born I was so surprised I didn't talk for a year and a half.
Irene Nemirovsky
#36. I keep telling you, you don't pay enough attention to the minor characters. A novel should be like a street full of strangers, where no more than two or three people are known to us in depth.
Irene Nemirovsky
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