Fleur Jaeggy > Quotes

“I still thought that to get something you had to go straight for your goal whereas it is only distractions, uncertainty, distance that bring us closer to our targets, and then it is the targets which strike us.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“What are the girls thinking of? At least half are nostalgic for death, and for a temple, and for all of those clothes.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“Once when I was eight years old my grandmother asked me, what will you do when you grow up? And I answered, I want to die. I want to die when I grow up. I want to die soon. And I think my sister really liked that answer.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, I Am the Brother of XX

“Inside, a mother superior, ethereal, delicate, who took me under her wing. She caressed me with her slender, soft hands, she sat next to me as if I were a friend. One day she disappeared. In her place arrived a buxom Swiss from Canton Uri. It's common knowledge that a new leader will hate the predecessors' favourites. A boarding school is like a harem.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“I've found it hard sometimes to turn my back on the natural call of the waves, and I don't envy the temperament of vultures or of stars. The blinds at my windows have been fluttering for fifty years.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, The Water Statues

“The wind wrinkled the dark lake and my thoughts as it swept on the clouds, chopped them up with its hatchet; between them you could just glimpse the Last Judgement, finding each of us guilty of nothing.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“People, nearly all of them, don’t know how to worry about others without being presumptuous, with finesse, with modesty. They think they know. My sister thought she knew. Knew the human race. . . . Knowledge doesn’t know. But that’s something few understand.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sono il fratello di XX

“Cuando se está allí dentro, una imagina cosas grandiosas sobre el mundo, y cuando sale, a veces desearía volver a oír el sonido de la campana.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“I am familiar with the impatience we feel when forced to suspend the enchantment of solitude.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Le statue d'acqua

“You can call me a thief if you like, a thief of ceremonies”
― Fleur Jaeggy, The Water Statues

“Children lose interest in their parents when they are left. They are not sentimental. They are passionate and cold. [...] They learn to pretend. And pretense becomes the most active, the realest part, alluring as dreams. It takes place of what we think is real. - pg. 11-12”
― Fleur Jaeggy, S. S. Proleterka

“His eyes stayed open imperiously. No one could close his eyelids. The room smoked of grief.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, These Possible Lives

“The bell rings, we get up. The bell rings again, we go to bed. We retire to our rooms; we saw life pass by beneath our windows, observed it in books and on our walks, watched the seasons change. It was always a reflection, a reflection that seemed to freeze on our windowsills... We imagined the world. What else can we imagine now if not our own deaths? The bell rings and it's all over.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“I knew Frédérique wouldn't write. But I persevered in the pleasure of taking my sadness to the limit, the way one does with some practical joke. The pleasure of disappointment. It wasn't new to me. I had been relishing it ever since I was eight years old, a boarder in my first, religious, school. And perhaps they were the best years, I thought. Those years of discipline. There was a kind of elation, faint but constant throughout all those days of discipline, the sweet days of discipline.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“Hemos imaginado el mundo. ¿Qué otra cosa puede imaginarse si no es la propia muerte? El sonido de una campana y todo ha terminado.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“Our minds are a series of graves in a wall. Our non-entities are all there when the register is called, gluttonous creatures; sometimes they fly up like vultures to hide the faces of those we loved. A multitude of faces dwell in the graves, a rich pasturage.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“La vida para mí se hacía demasiado larga. La literatura, por sí sola, no me distraía.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“I feel, as one does with the dead, that I've left something unfinished, a conversation, and we go on with that conversation, addressing ourselves to the dead, even if a certain haziness of memory clouds our wake over these conversations we never had. If their faces are forgotten, if certain features have faded, as in a painting, all that remains are our own voices, which we feel can't be answered. Yet, from somewhere, the dead do answer. Or they refuse to out of spite. Like stubborn schoolgirls who won't speak. We go on speaking. We are aware of moving our lips, though there is no one here.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“She was one of those girls who should have had a different life.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“But one does have to give words some credit. One has to at least pretend that they more or less resemble their meaning. Their shady meaning.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sono il fratello di XX

“On a bench a toad kept him company: "A slaughterhouse aesthetic must exist.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, The Water Statues

“Hij liep verder, zag andere mooi ingerichte kamers, mensen die de krant zaten te lezen, de etalages van de woningen toonden hem hoe rustig het leven van de anderen kon zijn, hoe heerlijk het is om in een luie stoel te zitten en de regen tegen de ruiten te horen slaan. Opnieuw voelde hij de overtuiging dat zijn leven voorbijging, voorbij was, en des te meer genoegen deed het hem de inspanningen van zijn medemensen, van de Nederlandse bevolking, te bewonderen, en hun volharding tegenover de stralende pieken van huiselijke vertroosting. Dergelijke taferelen van home sweet home schokten zijn hart, van zoveel geluk zag hij liever af.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, The Water Statues

“Sui prati scoscesi volavano bassi i corvi, deformi, va na gloriosi, crudeli. Li avevi paragonati alla nostra adolescenza, mentre cercavano, nella terra intorno al collegio, dove mettere gli artigli.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“I declared myself, I declared my love. More than to her I spoke to the landscape. The train looked like a toy, it left. ‘Ne sois pas triste.’ She left me a note. I had lost what was most important in my life, the sky was still blue, oblivious, everything yearned for peace and happiness, the landscape was idyllic, like idyllic, desperate adolescence. The landscape seemed to protect us, the small white houses of Appenzell, the fountain, the sign Töchterinstitut, it was as if the place hadn’t been affected by human distortions. Can one feel disorientated in an idyll? An atmosphere of catastrophe covered the land-scape. The irremediable came home to me in one of the most beautiful, transparent days of the year.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“She makes no reply. It seemed to me that the subject irritated her. Or that it was not the right moment. There are times when you can say what you think or ask questions, and others when you can’t. These are the so-called wrong moments. And since the wrong moments fill up the hours, you end up not asking any more.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, S. S. Proleterka

“If there weren’t exceptions, why look at all that surrounds us?”
― Fleur Jaeggy, The Water Statues

“A scent of celery settled over me. Here in Amsterdam the way fish is displayed is so considerate, but the garlic isn't very white.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, The Water Statues

“Years later the bigot Agnes Blannbekin, on the 1st of January, again and again turns in her mouth, tender as egg-skin and very sweet, Christ’s foreskin.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, I Am the Brother of XX

“C'è qualcosa di assoluto e di imprendibile in certi esseri, sembra una lontananza dal mondo, dai vivi, ma sembra anche il segno di chi subisce un potere che non conosciamo.”
― Fleur Jaeggy

“Father and daughter stand before the ship. She looks like a naval vessel. The red star glitters on the funnel. I look immediately at the lettering Proleterka. Blackened, patches of rust, forgotten. Sovereign lettering. The dusk is falling. The ship is large, she hides the sun that is about to sink into the water. She is darkness, pitch and mystery. A privateer built like a fortress, she has survived stormy weather and shipwreck. We go up the gangplank. The officers are waiting for us. We are the last.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, S. S. Proleterka