Anne Serre > Quotes

“Basically, the Narrator said to himself, the idea we form of others comes solely from their relationship with ourselves. Seen through their relationship with someone else, they are necessarily slightly different. And should we catch a glimpse of them in the privacy of their own self (which is impossible without spying on them or rummaging through their papers) they are someone of whom we know strictly nothing.”
― Anne Serre, A Leopard-Skin Hat

“Hiking around like this, they experience the kind of joy that makes you eager for life, and eager to lead a fuller life. Whenever they walked past a leafy green enclosure they felt, not that happiness was there in that leafy green enclosure, but that happiness was like that, had the silent majesty of those leaves, the dimensions of that buoyant enclosure, the dreamy depths of its carpet of grass, and that they needed to have all these forces and qualities coursing through their life.”
― Anne Serre, The Governesses

“At the time, she knew nothing of all this. But what she found so attractive in him was, yes, a wound, what else could she call it, a wound that was the exact—no, the ideal—counterpart to her own. Guillaume had certainly had to deal with that wound, but as a doctor, not as a brother in poverty.”
― Anne Serre, The Beginners

“Her life even seemed to come together, her emotions to fall back into place. As if doing a little harm could do you a little good, not because it gave you some unspeakable thrill (certainly not) but because it instilled a certain gravity in you, whereby you began to resemble the rest of the world, the ones who live, who somehow manage to live.”
― Anne Serre, A Leopard-Skin Hat

“She knows - or rather, is haunted by - all sorts of things she'll never talk about to anyone. Mainly because she's frightened of these revelations that go coursing through her, but also because naming them would give them a reality, an existence. She's more interested in casting them out.”
― Anne Serre, A Leopard-Skin Hat

“Her life even seemed to come together, her emotions to fall back into place. As if doing a little harm could do you a lile good, not because it gave you some unspeakable thrill (certainly not) but because it instilled a certain gravity in you, whereby you began to resemble the rest of the world, the ones who live, who somehow manage to live.”
― Anne Serre, A Leopard-Skin Hat

“When you’re out on a limb, you have to try everything.”
― Anne Serre, A Leopard-Skin Hat

“She was like a horse in fetters, it was truly dreadful to behold: to be so full of life, yet bound up in chains. And for what? To what end? Merely to endure, to endure a little longer.”
― Anne Serre, A Leopard-Skin Hat

“Much of the time Fanny’s body was lost in thought, like the rest of her being.
Quizzical even. She had a way of standing in her swimsuit in a mountain lake, up to her knees in water, like a question. She wasn’t gazing off into the distance, nor was she contemplating the shimmering veil of the lake’s surface exactly; no, she was simply standing there, waiting for something manifestly impossible to happen, some unearthly apparition or reckoning; and were you then to gently recall her to her “senses,” she would emerge from a grim, dreamlike state beneath the dome of which no bird flew.”
― Anne Serre, A Leopard-Skin Hat

“Her life even seemed to come together, her emotions to fall back into place. As if doing a lile harm could do you a lile good, not because it gave you some unspeakable thrillcertainly notbut because it instilled a certain gravity in you, whereby you began to resemble the rest of the world, the ones who live, who somehow manage to live.”
― Anne Serre, A Leopard-Skin Hat

“As if doing a little harm could do you a little good, not because it gave you some unspeakable thrill - certainly not - but because it instilled a certain gravity in you, whereby you began to resemble the rest of the world, the ones who live, who somehow manage to live.”
― Anne Serre, A Leopard-Skin Hat

“It's not so unusual to be unwittingly responsible for someone's destruction. Many of us have been, many of us will be, from the dawn of history until the end of time. And if we stand back and consider our individual lives from light-years away, we may find all this savagery has meaning and a purpose.”
― Anne Serre

“She doesn’t really take in the scenery, except in a desultory sort of way. It’s inside herself that she looks, astonished at the sight of this dark turmoil, puzzled to be harboring such a thing, understandably a bit skeptical, but doing what she can to acknowledge its incredible existence.”
― Anne Serre, A Leopard-Skin Hat