Deborah Levy Quotes & Sayings

We have to mourn our dead, but we cannot let them take over our life. — Deborah Levy

Life ia only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll al get home safely. — Deborah Levy

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

They would be enchanted beginners all over again, ... That was the best thing to be in life. — Deborah Levy

play with whatever the day brought in. — Deborah Levy

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

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

It was impossible to believe that someone did not want to be saved from their incoherence. — Deborah Levy

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

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

The young woman was a window waiting to be climbed through. A window that she guessed was a little broken anyway. — Deborah Levy

J.K. watches a storm rage into the crimson afternoon. The sky is electric. Rain whips her bare arms and legs. Dustbins are hauled into the air, caught on the wind's curve. Bags and pillowcase unpacked for a while, toothbrush, perfume, books, a little pile of yellow feathers, J.K. knows she too is caught in the wind. She is Europe's eerie child, and she is part of the storm." (from "Swallowing Geography" by Deborah Levy) — Deborah Levy

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

He lifted his arm that had been resting on her shoulders and gazed at the words she had written on his hand. He had been branded as cattle are branded to show whom they belong to. The cold mountain air stung his lips. She was driving too fast on this road that had once been a forest. Early humans had lived in it. They studied fire and the movement of the sun. They read the clouds and the moon and tried to understand the human mind His father had tried to melt him into a Polish forest when he was five years old. He knew he must leave no trace or trail of his existence because he must never find his way home. That was what his father had told him. You cannot come home. This was not something possible to know but he had to know it all the same — Deborah Levy

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

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

She was not a poet. She was a poem. — Deborah Levy

The unloved watch the loved perform the small rituals of their loving. — Deborah Levy

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

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

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

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

I can't stand THE DEPRESSED. It's like a job, it's the only thing they work hard at. Oh good my depression is very well today. Oh good today I have another mysterious symptom and I will have another one tomorrow. The DEPRESSED are full of hate and bile and when they are not having panic attacks they are writing poems. What do they want their poems to DO? Their depression is the most VITAL thing about them. Their poems are threats. ALWAYS threats. There is no sensation that is keener or more active than their pain. They give nothing back except their depression. It's just another utility. Like electricity and water and gas and democracy. They could not survive without it. — Deborah Levy

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

Time has shattered, it's cracked like my lips. — Deborah Levy

What is a sigh? That would be another good subject for a field study. Is it just a long, deep, audible exhalation of breath? Rose's sigh was intense but not subdued. It was frustrated but not yet sad. A sigh resets the respiratory system so it was possible that my mother had been holding her breath, which suggests she was more nervous than she appeared to be. A sigh is an emotional response to being set a difficult task. — Deborah Levy

My love for my mother is like an axe. It cuts very deep. — Deborah Levy

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

This was the rearranged space of yesterday. — Deborah Levy

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

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

Has anyone ever actually told you how up yourself you are? — Deborah Levy

It smelt of coconut ice cream and sweat and the Mediterranean sea. I — Deborah Levy

We are East & West looting each other. — Deborah Levy

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

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

I want to be master of my own fuck-ups. — Deborah Levy

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

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

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

I would like to forget the image of the ship's crane at Southampton docks when it lifted into the sky the three wooden trunks which held all that my family owned. There is only one memory I want to preserve. It is Maria, who is also Zama, sipping condensed milk on the steps of the doep at night. The African nights were warm. The stars were bright. I loved Maria but I'm not sure she loved me back. Politics and poverty had separated her from her own children and she was exhausted by the white children in her care, by everyone and everything in her care. At the end of the day, away from the people who stole her life's energy and made her tired, she had found a place to rest, momentarily, from myths about her character and her purpose in life." (from "Things I Don't Want to Know" by Deborah Levy) — Deborah Levy

I am not okay. Not at all and haven't been for some time. I did not tell her how discouraged I felt and that I was ashamed I was not more resilient and all the rest of it which included wanting a bigger life but that so far I had not been bold enough to make a bid for things I wanted to happen and I feared it was written in the stars that I might end up with a reduced life like hers... — Deborah Levy

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

How do we set about not imagining something? — Deborah Levy

We are East & West looting each other. — Deborah Levy

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

It is not enough to feel love. More important is how we express love. — Deborah Levy

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

It would take a while for me not to think of the Greek language as the father who walked out on me — Deborah Levy

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

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

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

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

No wonder women told him their thoughts like they told no other man. Rabah admired their bodies and laughed at their jokes. He looked like what he was a desired and much loved man with light in his eyes and money in the bank. But he also hurt women. I have seen them weep over Rabah because he removed his affection and attention and the light in his eyes shone on someone else. How was it that he could love me one day and not love me the next? What do you do with the love you feel if it is not returned? — Deborah Levy

Anything covered is always interesting. There is never nothing beneath something that is covered. — Deborah Levy

To be forceful was not the same as being powerful and to be gentle was not the same as being fragile ... — Deborah Levy

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