Anne Garréta > Quotes

“I had thought that I would never be able to grow tired of loving, but one night I woke to an absence of love and felt no torture: it was the absence of this tortute that truly scared me, that tortured me”
― Anne Garréta, Sphinx

“I was haunted by the possibility of settling into a place long enough for time's passing to become tangible.”
― Anne Garréta, Sphinx

“I concluded that making love without laughing was as bad as gifting a book written in a language the recipient does not know.”
― Anne Garréta, Sphinx

“For six months, from October to March, I succumbed to my natural tendency for reclusion, living between my bed and my desk.”
― Anne Garréta, Sphinx

“I was the shadow of a body that ignored me; I was also the source of light that produced that shadow. All that came back to me was a projection of myself. A*** was merely a parasite interposed between my consciousness and my unfailing tendency to diffract the real.”
― Anne Garréta, Sphinx

“All of her mannerisms, even her way of sitting, are of a perfect femininity. Or: how to occupy the least possible amount of space in the world.”
― Anne Garréta, Not One Day

“By distancing myself from the world, I was squandering my destiny: such was the malediction of recognizing the world’s infamy but not allowing myself to spit in its face.”
― Anne Garréta, Sphinx

“Before, I was mourning the present; today I mourn a past that was never present.”
― Anne Garréta

“This, forever oscillating between forced tranquility and irrepressible anguish, I was disconcerting those around me. And indeed, how was I to explain this apparent absurdity: that it is possible to have feelings, to suffer from them, and at the same time be unable to cut oneself off from them or to have any contempt for them.”
― Anne Garréta, Sphinx

“Trying to forget through reading, I ended up forgetting everything, even reaching a state of self-oblivion, which alone is able to appease suffering: a blackout in the broken dream of this narrative.”
― Anne Garréta, Sphinx

“The machine was running on empty, racing, turning out a fortune without producing an iota of delight: no one enjoyed themselves in the least in these clubs, and I started to doubt whether anyone ever had.”
― Anne Garréta, Sphinx

“To clutch someone in my arms took on, without fail, a singular sense of indignity, the taste of putrefaction. When I embrace someone I am submerged in a feeling of infamy, in the nauseating sensation of having an orgasm in a charnel house, among the noxious fumes of decomposing flesh. I am revolted by flesh, but this revlusion, failing to deaden the assaults of my libido, merely infects them with a cadaverous terror.”
― Anne Garréta, Sphinx

“Irony alone is damning.
The flesh will be bland and you will believe you are forever reading the same book.”
― Anne Garréta, Not One Day

“I was running after the sublime, where everything is good. I was chasing after an image of ruffled sails that raise themselves like a phantom ship on a sea of oil, drifting, coming together, breaking free at the command of imperceptible trade winds, trailing around an infinite sorrow to the four corners of the stage. And whether the ship was a galley, a schooner, a merchant ship, or a privateer vessel didn’t matter. What did I care whether it put up its sails or slowly stripped itself bare? Its wandering was what moved me.”
― Anne Garréta, Sphinx

“That odor of city rain, which, hot or cold, has always frozen my blood, surged forth like a spindrift of funereal nostalgia.”
― Anne Garréta, Sphinx

“Passion–arbitrary, blind, and indifferent–needs only to feed off its own intensity to achieve the paroxysm of its pleasure: its object is of no consequence, chosen arbitrarily and without discrimination.”
― Anne Garréta

“When I close my eyes, I see my soul as a screen crisscrossed with flowing, intertwined lines; architectural straight lines of a volume uncertain of its limits, exposed on all sides; a fragile construction, by turns knocked down, invaded, uprooted, robbed of its foundations, mined by all those embraces in which it happily prostitutes itself.”
― Anne Garréta, Sphinx

“For life is too short to resign ourselves to reading poorly written books and sleeping with women we don't love.”
― Anne Garréta, Not One Day

“In a hollow of smashed pavement at my feet is a puddle of stagnant water frozen on the surface; it looks like a pane of ancient glass studded with detritus and trapped air bubbles.”
― Anne Garréta, Sphinx

“And indeed, how was I to explain this apparent absurdity: that it is possible to have feelings, to suffer for them, and at the same time to be unable to cut oneself off from them or to have any contempt for them.”
― Anne Garréta, Sphinx

“Concrete’s no job for sissies.

C liturgy wrapped in a diddle inside a chinchilla.”
― Anne Garréta, In Concrete