Deborah Levy > Quotes

“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, Hot Milk

“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, Pillow Talk in Europe and Other Places

“She was not a poet. She was a poem.”
― Deborah Levy, Swimming Home

“Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realize we don't want to hold it together.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography

“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, Hot Milk

“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, Things I Don't Want to Know

“I will never stop grieving for my long-held wish for enduring love that does not reduce its major players to something less than they are.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography

“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, Things I Don't Want to Know

“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, Swimming Home

“Sometimes we want to unbelong as much as we want to belong.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography

“When our father does the things he needs to do in the world, we understand it is his due. If our mother does the things she needs to do in the world, we feel she has abandoned us. It is a miracle she survives our mixed messages, written in society's most poisoned ink. It is enough to drive her mad.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography

“My love for my mother is like an axe. It cuts very deep.”
― Deborah Levy, Hot Milk

“Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living

“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, Swimming Home

“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, Things I Don't Want to Know

“Like everything that involves love, our children made us happy beyond measure – and unhappy too – but never as miserable as the twenty-first century Neo-Patriarchy made us feel. It required us to be passive but ambitious, maternal but erotically energetic, self-sacrificing but fulfilled – we were to be Strong Modern Women while being subjected to all kinds of humiliations, both economic and domestic. If we felt guilty about everything most of the time, we were not sure what it was we had actually done wrong." (from "Things I Don't Want to Know" by Deborah Levy)”
― Deborah Levy, Things I Don't Want to Know

“Anything covered is always interesting. There is never nothing beneath something that is covered.”
― Deborah Levy, Hot Milk: Now a major motion picture starring Emma Mackey and Fiona Shaw

“We have to mourn our dead, but we cannot let them take over our life.”
― Deborah Levy, Hot Milk

“It was not that easy to convey to him, a man much older than she was, that the world was her world, too. He had taken a risk when he invited her to join him at his table. After all, she came with a whole life and libido of her own. It had not occurred to him that she might not consider herself to be the minor character and him the major character. In this sense, she had unsettled a boundary, collapsed a social hierarchy, broken with the usual rules.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography

“... to be forceful was not the same as being powerful and to be gentle was not the same as being fragile...”
― Deborah Levy, Swimming Home

“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, Swimming Home

“we do not have to conform to the way our life has been written for us, especially by those who are less imaginative than ourselves.”
― Deborah Levy, Real Estate: A Living Autobiography

“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, Hot Milk

“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, Hot Milk

“The young woman was a window waiting to be climbed through. A window that she guessed was a little broken anyway.”
― Deborah Levy, Swimming Home

“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, Hot Milk

“Everything was calm. The sun was shining. I was swimming in the deep. And then, when I surfaced 20 years later, I discovered there was a storm, a whirlpool, a blasting gale lifting the waves over my head.
At first I wasn’t sure I’d make it back to the boat and then I realised I didn’t want to make it back to the boat. Chaos is supposed to be what we most fear but I have come to believe it might be what we most want. If we don’t believe in the future we are planning, the house we are mortgaged to, the person who sleeps by our side, it is possible that a tempest (long lurking in the clouds) might bring us closer to how we want to be in the world.
Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realise we don’t want to hold it together.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography

“I have never got a grip on when the past begins or where it ends, but if cities map the past with statues made from bronze forever frozen in one dignified position, 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, Swimming Home

“The fact that lipstick and mascara and eye shadow were called 'Make Up' thrilled me. Everywhere in the world there were made up people and most of them were women.”
― Deborah Levy, Things I Don't Want to Know

“I had energy because I had no choice but to have energy. I had to write to support my children and I had to do all the heavy lifting. Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography