Violette Leduc Quotes & Sayings

Drink, my angel; everything I have inside me is yours, soak it up through the paper, through the sleeve of my coat. Suck my blood out of the hollow of my elbow where you are lying, where you are keeping warm. It's just as you please, it will always be just as you please from now on. — Violette Leduc

To have an inner life, to think, to juggle and leap, to become a tightrope walker in the world of ideas. To attack, to riposte, to refute, what a contest, what acclaim. To understand. The most generous word of all. Memory. To retain, a geyser of felicity. Intelligence. The agonizing poverty of my mind. Words and ideas flitting in and out like butterflies. My brain a dandelion seed blown in the wind. — Violette Leduc

We are talking. It's a shame. What is said is murdered. Our words that will not grow any bigger or any lovelier will wilt inside our bones. Words wither feelings. — Violette Leduc

To find relief in what has been, we must make ourselves eternal. — Violette Leduc

I give myself to adjectives body and soul, I die with pleasure for them. — Violette Leduc

It is not only streams and rivers that flow: a street, with a door set back from it, can slide over into the depth of an abyss. The street was her youth, was all the minutes, the seconds of her existence. The grass sprouting between the cobbles, the pinpricks, the needles while her stomach cried its hunger. The closed door, the step she sat on - quietly, for there was nothing she desired. A door set back from the street was enough for her. To grow old is to wrap ourselves up well so we can wander warmly through our private catacombs. — Violette Leduc

Her eyes were misting over, her heart was talking on her lips. To need everything when everything is finished. She no longer knew whether she was sad or whether it was hunger. To live like that, head bent forward, chin resting down near her breasts, without muscles, without sinews, without vertebrae.
She smiled a martyr's smile for her own benefit: for her wretchedness was also a tenderness, and resignation is not the same as oblivion. — Violette Leduc

I was afraid of having to present my big nose to strangers. — Violette Leduc

I was and I always shall be hampered by what I think other people will say. — Violette Leduc

To write is to inform against others. — Violette Leduc

I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music. It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips. — Violette Leduc

Often, we melt into our ecstasies as though they were jams, as though we were sinking into syrupy bowls of gooseberries, of raspberries, of bilberries. — Violette Leduc

At the age of five, of six, at the age of seven, I used to begin weeping sometimes without warning, simply for the sake of weeping, my eyes open wide to the sun, to the flowers ... I wanted to feel an immense grief inside me, and it came. — Violette Leduc

My mother never took my hand. — Violette Leduc

There's no sustenance in the past. — Violette Leduc