Edouard Leve Quotes & Sayings

This was perhaps what you feared: to become inert in a body that still breathes, drinks, and feeds itself. To commit suicide in slow motion. — Edouard Leve

You directed toward yourself a violence that you did not feel toward others. For them you reserved all your patience and tolerance. You — Edouard Leve

You are like the actor who, at the end of the play, with a final word, reveals that he is a different character than the one he appeared to be playing. — Edouard Leve

If you were still alive, you would perhaps have become a stranger to me. Dead, you are as alive as you are vivid. Your — Edouard Leve

You were said to have died of suffering. But you died because you searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void. — Edouard Leve

When I am coming back from a trip, the best part isn't going through the airport or getting home, but the taxi ride in between: you're still travelling, but not really. — Edouard Leve

You were not surprised to find yourself ill adapted to the world, but it did surprise you that the world had produced a being who now lived in it as a foreigner. Do plants commit suicide? Do animals die of helplessness? They either function or disappear. You were perhaps a weak link, an accidental evolutionary dead end, a temporary anomaly not destined to burgeon again. — Edouard Leve

Dialogue binds me Monologue imposes upon me Soliloquy isolates me The — Edouard Leve

I have no desire to change things because I am the youngest in my family. I like meeting new people when I travel: these brief and inconsequential encounters have the thrill of beginnings and the sadness of separations. — Edouard Leve

Your life was a hypothesis. Those who die old are made of the past. Thinking of them, one thinks of what they have done. Thinking of you, one thinks of what you could have become. You were, and you will remain, made up of possibilities. — Edouard Leve

A dictionary resembles the world more than a novel does, because the world is not a coherent sequence of actions but a constellation of things perceived. It is looked at, unrelated things congregate, and geographic proximity gives them meaning. If events follow each other, they are believed to be a story. But in a dictionary, time doesn't exist: ABC is neither more nor less chronological than BCA. To portray your life in order would be absurd: I remember you at random. My brain resurrects you through stochastic details, like picking marbles out of a bag. — Edouard Leve

Since you seldom spoke, you were rarely wrong. You seldom spoke because you seldom went out. If you did go out, you listened and watched. Now, since you no longer speak, you will always be right. In truth, you do still speak: through those, like me, who bring you back to life, and interrogate you. We hear your responses and admire their wisdom. If the facts turned out to contradict your counsel, we blame ourselves for having misinterpreted you. Yours are the truths, ours are the errors. — Edouard Leve

The homeless embodied the final stage in a decline your life could have tended toward. You did not take them for victims, but for authors of their own lives. — Edouard Leve

Time is lacking for me
Space is enough for me
The void attracts me — Edouard Leve

To know makes me grow
Not to know harms me
To forget frees me. — Edouard Leve

You spoke to strangers for hours. Afterward you walked the streets in search of other cafes, but they were closed. You stretched out on the park benches of a square near the Gare Saint-Lazare, and you remarked on the shape of the clouds. At six o'clock you had breakfast. At seven you took the first train home. When, the next day, your friends repeated to you the words you had spoken to strangers in the cafe, you remembered nothing of them. It was as though someone else inside you had spoken. You recognized neither your words, nor your thoughts, but you liked them better than you would have if you had remembered saying them. Often all it took was for someone else to speak your own words back to you for you to like them. — Edouard Leve

The eve of a long trip is filled with both exaltation and anxiety, but the day itself is a pure euphoria of action, and anxiety returns in the middle of the trip, at an empty moment, when the exoticism of the setting out has not yet given way to that of going home. — Edouard Leve

When you traveled with company, the country would shrink away; your companion would become the subject of your voyage as much as the country itself. As for group travel, the country would end up being the silent host whose presence one forgets like one does an overly timid guest, the principal subject becoming the backdrop. — Edouard Leve

You didn't identify with happy people, and in your excessiveness you projected onto those who had failed in everything, or succeeded in nothing. — Edouard Leve

I am not looking to seduce a wearer of Birkenstocks. I do not like the big toe. — Edouard Leve

This selfishness of your suicide displeased you. But, all things considered, the lull of death won out over life's painful commotion. — Edouard Leve

Only the living seem incoherent. Death closes the series of events that constitutes their lives. So we resign ourselves to finding a meaning for them. To refuse them this would amount to accepting that a life, and thus life itself, is absurd. Yours had not yet attained the coherence of things done. Your death gave it this coherence. Lev — Edouard Leve

Fifteen years old is the middle of my life, regardless of when I die. — Edouard Leve

At the beach girls arouse me less than in the library. — Edouard Leve

Everything I Write is True, But So What? — Edouard Leve

Your suicide makes the lives of those who outlive you more intense. Should they be threatened by boredom, or tshould the absurdity of their lives leap out at them from the curve of some cruel mirror, let them remember you, and the pain of existence will seem preferable to the disquietude of no longer being. — Edouard Leve

Only once can I say "I'm dying" without telling a lie. The best day of my life may already be behind me. — Edouard Leve

You couldn't have been said to dance, exactly. Despite the music sounding around you, bodies being carried away by the whirling bass, it didn't get inside you. You used to trace out the steps, but you were mimicking dancing, rather than doing it. You would dance alone. When a look crossed yours, you'd smile like someone caught off guard in an absurd situation. — Edouard Leve

Until the age of twelve I thought I was gifted with the power to shape the future, but this power was a crushing burden, it manifested itself in the form of threats, I had to take just so many steps before I got to the end of the sidewalk or else my parents would die in a car accident, I had to close the door thinking of some favorable outcome, for example passing a test, or else I'd fail, I had to turn off the light not thinking about my mother getting raped, or that would happen, one day I couldn't stand having to close the door a hundred times before I could think of something good, or to spend fifteen minutes turning off the light the right way, I decided enough was enough, the world could fall apart, I didn't want to spend my life saving other people, that night I went to bed sure the next day would bring the apocalypse, nothing happened, I was relieved but a little bit disappointed to discover I had no power. — Edouard Leve

I don't write in the morning, my brain isn't up to it yet, I don't write in the afternoon, I'm too sad, I write from five o'clock on, I need to have been awake a long time, my body relaxed from a day's fatigue. — Edouard Leve

it sometimes happened that you would, in the middle of your exertions, be discouraged by the absurdity of what you were in the process of doing: athletic exertion was vanity. You engaged in it less for the joy of the act than in order to exhaust yourself. — Edouard Leve

You used to give yourself over to endless sessions of doubt. You would claim to be an expert on the subject. But doubting would tire you so much that you would end up doubting doubt itself. I saw you one day at the end of an afternoon of solitary speculation. You were unmoving and petrified. Running several kilometers in a deep forest full of ravines and pitfalls would have exhausted you less. — Edouard Leve

In the midst of this utopia, which only your fellow lone voyagers would perceive, you used to transgress society's rules unknowingly, and no one would hold you accountable for it. You would mistakenly enter private residences, go to concerts to which you had not been invited, eat at community banquets where you could only guess the community's identity when they started giving speeches. Had you behaved like this in your own country, you would have been taken for a liar or a fool. But the improbable ways of a foreigner are accepted. Far from your home, you used to taste the pleasure of being mad without being alienated, of being an imbecile without renouncing your intelligence, of being an impostor without culpability. — Edouard Leve

I want this epitaph engraved on my tombstone: "See you soon — Edouard Leve

Life is proposed to me
My name is passed on to me
My body is imposed on me — Edouard Leve

A self excused is a self accused. — Edouard Leve

You did not fear death. You stepped in its path, but without really desiring it: how can one desire something one doesn't know? You didn't deny life but affirmed your taste for the unknown, betting that if something existed on the other side, it would be better than here. — Edouard Leve

You didn't like to travel. You rarely went abroad. You would spend your time in your bedroom. It seemed useless to you to travel for miles in order to stay in a place less comfortable than your own. — Edouard Leve

You had felt idle in this city through which you had paced only to kill time. But the emptiness that you believed yourself confronted with was an illusion: you had filled those moments with sensations all the more powerful in that nothing and no one had distracted you from them. — Edouard Leve

Once you confessed to someone that you had been very depressed when dining with her several months earlier. She was stunned, discovering her blindness like a time bomb. And you, faithful, kept a straight face. You — Edouard Leve

No one other than yourself could have given you a greater taste for life than for death. — Edouard Leve

To describe my life precisely would take longer than to live it. — Edouard Leve

Your taste for abbreviation meant that instead of finishing the works you undertook, you finished yourself. You — Edouard Leve

You would renounce organizing your future. You would let yourself be guided by the randomness of encounters and events, indifferent to one choice over another. — Edouard Leve

A self accused is a self excused." You — Edouard Leve

When you were awake, stretched out in your bed in the dark, shutters drawn, your thoughts would flow freely. They would grow obscure when you got up and opened the curtains. The violence of daylight would efface the nocturnal clarity. In the daytime, people were barriers, dividing you up, preventing you from hearing what you listened to at night: the voice of your brain. — Edouard Leve

Speaking commits me Listening teaches me Silence tempers me Birth — Edouard Leve

He resembled a corpse. This was perhaps what you feared: to become inert in a body that still breathes, drinks, and feeds itself. To commit suicide in slow motion. You — Edouard Leve

In their beginnings, events preserve the potential that they lose in their completion. Desire prolongs itself so long as it is not achieved. — Edouard Leve

The sight of land, far away, brought you back to the reality the sea had made you forget. As you drew nearer to the beach, you would leave behind the waking dream the waves had thrown you into — Edouard Leve

While traveling, a new destination would seem more desirable to you than wherever you were, right up to the moment you got there and found that your dissatisfaction had followed you: the mirage had shifted to the next stop-over point. Yet your preceding stops would become more attractive as you got further away from them. For you, the past would be forever improving, the future would draw you forward, but the present would weigh you down. — Edouard Leve

And so you worried about not remembering what happened in between the things you wrote down. You had lived those moments too. Where had they gone? — Edouard Leve