Annie Ernaux > Quotes

“Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.”
― Annie Ernaux, Happening

“Naturally I feel no shame in writing these things because of the time which separates the moment when they are written--when only I can see them--from the moment when they will be read by other people, a moment which I feel will never come. By then I could have had an accident or died; a war or a revolution could have broken out. This delay makes it possible for me to write today, in the same way I used to lie in the scorching sun for a whole day at sixteen, or make love wihout contraceptives at twenty: without thinking about the consequences”
― Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

“Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my writing is to find out whether other people have done or felt the same things or, if not, for them to consider experiencing such things as normal. Maybe I would also like them to live out these very emotions in turn, forgetting that they had once read about them somewhere.”
― Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

“When I was a child, luxury was fur coats, evening dresses, and villas by the sea. Later on, I thought it meant leading the life of an intellectual. Now I feel that it is also being able to live out a passion for a man or a woman.”
― Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

“I experienced pleasure like a future pain.”
― Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

“To exist is to drink oneself without thirst.”
― Annie Ernaux, Les Années

“From the very beginning, and throughout the whole of our affair, I had the privilege of knowing what we all find out in the end: the man we love is a complete stranger.”
― Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

“She teaches me that the world is made to be pounced on and enjoyed, and that there is absolutely no reason at all to hold back.”
― Annie Ernaux

“I started to make a literary being of myself, someone who lives as if her experiences were to be written down someday.”
― Annie Ernaux, Mémoire de fille

“I do not wish to explain my passion—that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify—I just want to describe it.”
― Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

“I have searched for my mother's love in all the corners of the world.”
― Annie Ernaux, I Remain in Darkness

“They will all vanish at the same time, like the millions of images that lay behind the foreheads of the grandparents, dead for half a century, and of the parents, also dead. Images in which we appeared as a little girl in the midst of beings who died before we were born, just as in our own memories our small children are there next to our parents and schoolmates. And one day we’ll appear in our children’s memories, among their grandchildren and people not yet born. Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.”
― Annie Ernaux, Les Années

“Pain cannot be kept intact, it needs to be “processed,” converted into humor.”
― Annie Ernaux, I Remain in Darkness

“I realize that I have left part of myself in a place where I shall probably never come back.”
― Annie Ernaux, Shame

“Where are the eyes of my childhood, those fearful eyes she had thirty years ago, the eyes that made me?”
― Annie Ernaux, I Remain in Darkness

“She feels as if a book is writing itself just behind her; all she has to do is live. But there is nothing.”
― Annie Ernaux, Les Années

“In his writings, Proust suggests that our memory is separate from us, residing in the ocean breeze or the smells of early autumn—things linked to the earth that recur periodically, confirming the permanence of mankind. For me and no doubt many of my contemporaries, memories are associated with ephemeral things such as a fashionable belt or a summer hit and therefore the act of remembering can do nothing to reaffirm my sense of identity or continuity. It can only confirm the fragmented nature of my life and the belief that I belong to history.”
― Annie Ernaux, Shame

“To grow old is to fade, to become transparent.”
― Annie Ernaux, I Remain in Darkness

“J'ai glissé dans cette moitié du monde pour laquelle l'autre n'est qu'un décor.”
― Annie Ernaux, La place

“There is no such thing as a lesser truth.”
― Annie Ernaux, L'Événement

“Quand j'étais enfant, le luxe c'était pour moi les manteaux de fourrure et les villas au bord de la mer. Plus tard, j'ai cru que c'était de mener une vie d'intellectuel. Il me semble maintenant que c'est aussi de pouvoir vivre une passion pour un homme ou une femme”
― Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

“at every moment in time, next to the things it seems natural to do and say, and next to the ones we’re told to think—no less by books or ads in the métro than by funny stories—are other things that society hushes up without knowing it is doing so. thus it condemns to lonely suffering all the people who feel but cannot name these things. then the silence breaks, little by little, or suddenly one day, and words burst forth, recognized at last, while underneath other silences start to form.”
― Annie Ernaux, Les Années

“All the hardships I have endured were merely rehearsals to prepare me for this devastating pain.”
― Annie Ernaux, I Remain in Darkness

“I shall try to conjure up each of the sentences engraved in my memory which were either so unbearable or so comforting to me at the time that the mere thought of them today engulfs me in a wave of horror or sweetness.”
― Annie Ernaux, Happening

“I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world.”
― Annie Ernaux, A Woman's Story

“J’ai tué ma mère en moi à ce moment-là.”
― Annie Ernaux, L'Événement

“In my student bathroom, I had given birth to both life and death.”
― Annie Ernaux, Happening

“Sauver quelque chose du temps où l'on ne sera plus jamais.”
― Annie Ernaux, Les Années

“Everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed, eliminated. All there will be is silence and no words to say it. Nothing will come out of the open mouth, neither I nor me. Language will continue to put the world into words. In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.”
― Annie Ernaux, The Years

“D'avoir reçu les clés pour comprendre la honte ne donne pas le pouvoir de l'effacer.”
― Annie Ernaux, Mémoire de fille