Violette Leduc > Quotes

“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, Mad in Pursuit

“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, The Lady and the Little Fox Fur

“I give myself to adjectives body and soul, I die with pleasure for them.”
― Violette Leduc, Mad in Pursuit

“She lived passionately on very little money and a great deal of curiosity, courage, and enthusiasm for books, nature, a cigarette, a bodice she was cutting out, a concert, a lecture, a fingernail file.”
― Violette Leduc, La Bâtarde

“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, The Lady and the Little Fox Fur

“My case is not unique : I am afraid of dying and distressed at being in this world. I haven’t worked, I haven’t studied. I have wept, I have cried out in protest. These tears and cries have taken up a great deal of my time. I am tortured by all the time lost whenever I think about it. I cannot think about things for long, but I can find pleasure in a withered lettuce leaf offering me nothing but regrets to chew over. There is no sustenance in the past. I shall depart as I arrived. Intact, loaded down with the defects that have tormented me. I wish I had been born a statue : I am a slug under my dunghill. Virtues, good qualities, courage, meditation, culture. With arms crossed on my breast I have broken myself against those words.”
― Violette Leduc, La Bâtarde

“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, The Lady and the Little Fox Fur

“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

“We embraced again, we wanted to engulf each other. We had cast off our families, the world, time, certainty. Clasping her against my gaping open heart, I wanted to draw Isabelle inside. Love is an exhausting invention. Isabelle, Thérèse, I pronounced in my head, getting used to the magical simplicity of our two names.”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse and Isabelle

“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. She let herself melt into her furniture and her things. Why expend her love elsewhere when they loved her all the time, when they were waiting for her? The world is a heavy burden, and yet we carry it. As soon as we are back in our burrows, whether joyful or discontented, we close the door upon it, we turn our backs upon it. The fidelity of our things is only an expression of our own infidelity.”
― Violette Leduc, The Lady and the Little Fox Fur

“Memories are comfy too, they are swaddling bands, they wrap you up warm like a mummy. What moment is there in life that is not already a memory?”
― Violette Leduc, The Lady and the Little Fox Fur

“Mon cas n'est pas unique : j'ai peur de mourir et je suis navrée d'être au monde. Je n'ai pas travaillé, je n'ai pas étudié. J'ai pleuré, j'ai crié. Les larmes et les cris m'ont pris beaucoup de temps.”
― Violette Leduc

“I contemplated her, I was remembering her in this present, I had her beside me from last moment to last moment. When you are in love you are always on a railway platform.”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse et Isabelle

“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

“It’s incredible,” she sighed. My eyebrows brushed Isabelle’s eyebrows. “It’s incredible the way I’m seeing you,”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse et Isabelle

“My case is not unique: I am afraid of dying and distressed at being in the world.”
― Violette Leduc, La Bâtarde

“Her name, my devotion.”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse and Isabelle

“Thirty days I’ve been a passenger at the school. I want to live here, I want to polish my shoes in the shoe room.”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse and Isabelle

“But there was a salve for her wound: she could always die now, because she had drawn all her benefits from the apricot trees in autumn. Seeing them was her whole life compressed into an instant's dream.”
― Violette Leduc, The Lady and the Little Fox Fur

“It's just as you please, it will always be just as you please from now on.”
― Violette Leduc

“I love it, it devours me. I adore it without illusions.”
― Violette Leduc

“Sometimes I was unfaithful to my grandmother during our walks. I would stop and let her walk on ahead, I would bend down and do up my shoelace, quickly I would pick up a stone or pebble, then run after her and give her my free hand. When the stone or pebble was warm I let it fall on something soft: the grass or sand. Then I could breathe with the satisfaction of having had an existence of my own.”
― Violette Leduc, La Bâtarde

“A caress is to a shiver as dusk is to a lightning flash.”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse et Isabelle

“she was releasing me from a world I had never lived in to launch me into one I could not yet inhabit.”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse and Isabelle

“What moment is there in life that is not already a memory?”
― Violette Leduc, The Lady and the Little Fox Fur

“No creo en el diablo. Si Dios existe no puede tener rival. El infierno es nuestra ambición del mal.”
― Violette Leduc, La Bâtarde

“Isabelle pulled me backwards, she laid me down across the eiderdown, lifted me, held me in her arms: she was releasing me from a world I had never lived in to launch me into one I could not yet inhabit. With her lips she parted mine, moistened my clenched teeth. The fleshiness of her tongue frightened me: the foreign sex did not enter. I waited, withdrawn, contemplative. The lips wandered over my lips: a dusting of petals. My heart was beating too loudly and I wanted to listen to this seal of sweetness, this soft new tracing. Isabelle is kissing me, I tell myself.”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse and Isabelle

“Quand on aime on est toujours sur le quai d'une gare.”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse et Isabelle

“She had made her honey on my lips, the sphinxes had gone to sleep once more.”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse and Isabelle

“A woman with a single passion, an amazon with severed breasts. The head on fire, the belly full of ice.”
― Violette Leduc, La Bâtarde