Philippe Besson > Quotes

“Why me?

He says: Because you are not like all the others, because I don't see anyone but you and you don't even realize it.

He adds this phrase, which for me is unforgettable: Because you will leave and we will stay.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“I just wanted to write to tell you that I have been happy during these months together, that I have never been so happy, and that I already know I will never be so happy again.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“(And when you've been hurt once, you're afraid to try again later, in dread of enduring the same pain. You avoid getting hurt in an attempt to avoid suffering: for years, this principle will serve as my holy sacrament. So many lost years.)”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“This is important: he sees me in a certain way, a way he will never deviate from. In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“I don't know then that one day I won't be seventeen. I don't know that youth doesn't last, that it's only a moment, and then it disappears and by the time you finally realize it, it's too late. It's finished, vanished, lost. There are some around me who can sense it; the adults repeat it constantly but I don't listen. Their words roll over me but don't stick. Like water off the feathers of a duck's back. I'm an idiot. An easygoing idiot.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“I think I love him for this loneliness, that it's what pushed me toward him. I love his aloofness, his disengagement with the outside world. Such singularity moves me.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“Nothing touches me more than cracks in the armor and the person who reveals them.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“This feeling of love, it transports me, it makes me happy. At the same time, it consumes me and makes me miserable, the way all impossible loves are miserable.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“Have you noticed how the most beautiful landscapes lose their brilliance as soon as our thoughts prevent us from seeing them properly?”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“I discover that absence has a consistency, like the dark water of a river, like oil, some kind of sticky dirty liquid that you can struggle and perhaps drown in. It has a thickness like night, an indefinite space with no landmarks, nothing to bang against, where you search for a light, some small glimmer, something to hang on to and guide you. But absence is, first and foremost, silence. A vast, enveloping silence that weighs you down and puts you in a state where any unforeseeable, identifiable sound can make you jump.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“I know that Thomas consented to this single picture only because he knew (had decided) that it was our last moment together. He smiled so that I could take his smile with me.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“I wrote the word: love. I did consider using another one. It's a curious notion, love; difficult to identify and define. There are so many degrees and variations. I could have contented myself with saying that I was smitten (and it is true that Thomas knew how to make me weaken), or infatuated (he could conquer, clatter, even bewitch like no one else), or obsessed (he often provoked a mixture of bewilderment and excitement, turning everything upside down), or seduced (once he caught me in his net, there was so no escaping), or taken with (I was stupidly joyful, I could heat up over nothing), or even blinded (anything that embarrassed me, I pushed to the side, minimizing his defects, putting his good qualities on a pedestal), or disturbed (no longer was I ever quite myself), which would have had less positive connotations. I could have explained it away as a mere affection, having a 'crush,' an explanation vague enough to mean anything. But those would just have been words. The truth, the brutal truth, was that I was in love. Enough to use the right word.

All the same, I wondered if this could be a complete invention. As you already know, I invented stories all the time, with so much authenticity that people usually ended up believing me sometimes even I was no longer able to disentangle the true from the false). Could I have made this story up from scratch? Could I have turned an erotic obsession into a passion? Yes, it's possible.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“I had the time to think all the way home about how affairs of the body are so much more preferable to affairs of the heart, but that sometimes you don't have the choice.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“He smiled so that I could take his smile with me.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“Always we desire too much or not enough and we compensate accordingly.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“No matter how much you want to respect someone's freedom (even when you consider it selfish), you still have your own pain, anger, and melancholy to contend with.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“En fin de compte, l'amour n'a été possible que parce qu'il m'a vu non pas tel que j'étais, mais tel que j'allais devenir.”
― Philippe Besson, « Arrête avec tes mensonges »

“He adds this phrase, which for me is unforgettable: Because you will leave and we will stay.

Even now I remain fascinated by this sentence. Understand, it isn't the premonition that fascinates me, nor even the fact that it has been realized. It's also not the maturity or poignancy implied. It's not the arrangement of the words, even if I'm aware that I probably wouldn't have been able to come up with those exact ones myself. It's the violence that the words carry within them, their admission of inferiority and, at the same time, of love.

He tells me something I did not know: that I will leave.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“I also know how much of yourself you have to leave behind in order to look like everyone else.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“I should be able to stay in this state of ecstasy. Or astonishment. Or let myself be overwhelmed by the incomprehensibility of it all. But the feeling that prevails the moment he disappears is that of being abandoned. Perhaps because it is already a familiar feeling.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“Je me demande si la froideur des pères fait l'extrême sensibilité des fils.”
― Philippe Besson, « Arrête avec tes mensonges »

“Je dis : pourquoi moi ?

Il dit  : parce tu n'es pas du tout comme les autres, parce qu'on ne voit que toi sans que tu t'en rendes compte. Il ajoute cette phrase, pour moi inoubliable  : parce que tu partiras et que nous resterons.”
― Philippe Besson, « Arrête avec tes mensonges »

“But we’re left stunted, compromised, by the burden of having to always lie and censor ourselves.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“I sense the ambition and ease of a generation that has grown up on a much smaller planet. Those who consider travel an ordinary adventure rather than a grand expedition, for whom a quiet life is considered a slow death. I see this child of the world and can't help but think how fate probably would have played out differently had his father been driven by the same curiosity. If he had not lived in another day. If he had known how to free himself.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“I wonder if it's cold fathers who make the sensitive sons.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“I discover the pain of waiting, because there is this refusal to admit defeat, to believe that a future where it happens again is possible. I try to convince myself that he'll make some kind of sign in my direction. The memory of our tangled bodies will overcome his resistance, it has to. As he told me himself, it's a question of necessity. You can't fight necessity. If you do, necessity will win.

I discover the pain of missing someone. I miss his skin, his body, which I once possessed and then had taken away from me. It must be given back under threat of madness.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“Mais surtout, nous ne retrouverons pas ce qui nous a poussés l'un vers l'autre, un jour. Cette urgence très pure. Ce moment unique. Il y a eu des circonstances, une conjonction de hasards, une somme de coïncidences, une simultanéité de désirs, quelque chose dans l'air, quelque chose aussi qui tenait à l'époque, à l'endroit, et ça a formé un moment, et ça a provoqué la rencontre, mais tout s'est distendu, tout est reparti dans des directions différentes, tout a éclaté, à la manière d'un feu d'artifice dont les fusées explosent au ciel nocturne dans tous les sens et dont les éclats retombent en pluie, et meurent à mesure qu'ils chutent et disparaissent avant de pouvoir toucher le sol, pour que ça ne brûle personne, pour que ça ne blesse personne, et le moment est terminé, mort, il ne reviendra pas  ; c'est cela qui nous est arrivé.”
― Philippe Besson, « Arrête avec tes mensonges »

“Today, when I meet children on this beach, when I see them running in the dunes, or lying on the hot stone wall that was once a levee, I remember that I was like them once, with their incredible lightness and insouciance, soaking in the sun. You can never really let go of your childhood. Especially when it was happy.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“The question that imposed itself: Why me?
The image doesn't fit: my thick glasses, my stretched-out blue Nordic sweater, the student head slaps, the too-good grades, the feminine gestures. Why me?
He says: Because you are not like all the others, because I don't see anyone but you and you don't even realize it.”
― Philippe Besson, « Arrête avec tes mensonges »