Marie Darrieussecq > Quotes

“Les femmes n'ont pas de nom. Elles ont un prénom. Leur nom est un prêt transitoire, un signe instable, leur éphémère. Elles trouvent d'autres repères. Leur affirmation au monde, leur "être là", leur création, leur signature, en sont déterminés. Elles s'inventent dans un monde d'hommes, par effraction.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Être ici est une splendeur : Vie de Paula M. Becker

“The emptiness is so intense, that anything which enters it leaves a trace, something of it remains in space: in the silence, in the whiteness, nothingness becomes peopled, too.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, White

“Les rencontres nous signent. Nous devenons des livres d'or. Nous apprenons à parler des mots donnés par nos aimés. Quand il la revoit, "sa voix avait des plis comme la soie".”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Être ici est une splendeur : Vie de Paula M. Becker

“Par exemple, tu vois, là, tu crois que tu es en train de me parler, mais peut-être pas. Peut-être que tu imagines que tu me parles, et moi en vrai je ne t'écoute pas. Alors qu'on pourrait se parler directement de soi à soi. Tu vois, il vaut mieux rencontrer l'altérité, quitte à être malheureux, que rester dans sa petite sûreté personnelle. L'essentiel c'est d'avoir des failles. Pas sa petite conscience tranquille. (p154)”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Clèves

“Elle essaie de former des sons avec sa bouche. Mais ils éclatent comme des bulles, et ne reste qu'une impression blanche, un pli dans quelque chose qui se lisse dès qu'apparu, qui s'efface sitôt pensé. (p245)”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Clèves

“Il moque l'accent américain, « ils disent champagne comme John Wayne ».”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes

“It wasn't night, it was simply darkness, with me in the middle hoping all the while that time was carrying on flowing, that something would crop up, me all alone in the middle, with my veins and my muscles dissolving rapidly into nothingness, me made of molecules of flesh and thought, dispersing in a cloud (a process of expansion as sudden as that of the room, a nebula of bedroom and me, between limits that grew dimmer by the moment).”
― Marie Darrieussecq, My Phantom Husband

“Basque people are travellers. They fold the world over on itself, which creates hems, hollows, new shapes.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Sleepless

“Traduire est la plus amoureuse des lectures.”
― Marie Darrieussecq

“The world was evaporating under the sun and I was floating. The town was evolving according to the laws of some sublime chemical reaction in which matter went from solid to gas, avoiding the liquid stage, peeling off gradually as layers of mist.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, My Phantom Husband

“The annihilation of space by time: Marx predicted it, Amazon enabled it.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Sleepless

“Me olisqueó el trasero en vez de darme la mano pero aparte de eso era un hombre con muy buena presencia, de lo más distinguido.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales

“Over the following days and weeks I would come to see, with mounting weariness, that this was to be the pattern of my life from now on: marginal and grim; my habitual daydreams and memories of our life as a couple reduced to nothing, to stuttering salvoes, by the gunpowder of the simple physical truth of my husband's absence.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, My Phantom Husband

“What will we miss when the last orangutan is dead? A way of being? Gestures. A certain relationship with trees. Unique hands, which pick up things in a way our hands don’t: a different type of contact. And those eyes contemplating the world. What we will also miss is their invitation: to ask ourselves who they are; and so to ask ourselves who we are. This movement towards them extends us, creates space within us, creates dreaming. Their presence elevates us. Their disappearance diminishes us. ‘There are some people who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Sleepless

“Insomnia is one of the spiralled forms of anxiety. In the bottomless room, the walls pulsate. They move away and they come closer. They shed their molecules in a shower. A black cloud fills the black air. I breathe in the atoms of the walls. I become those atoms. As the night is pulverized, it grinds me up. I am kneaded into the material from which black holes are made, I dissolve in the antimatter of the underside of the world.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Sleepless

“Bara människor utan visioner flyr in i verkligheten.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes

“L’ironie dénonce, le cynisme autorise.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Notre vie dans les forêts

“Anything is preferable to permanent wakefulness, to that criminal absence of forgetfulness…’ In this ‘vertiginous lucidity’, having a break from oneself, even for a few hours, is an impossible dream.38”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Sleepless

“We know more about Proust's asthma than his insomnia, and yet the two go together—along with his anorexia.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Sleepless: A Memoir of Insomnia

“The ham tastes like an old handbag.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Le Mal de mer

“The street seen backwards was like an invasion by the sea on the night of a flood. What I saw resembled an inside-out glove, the negative of a street. I was walking over the ocean bed, creeping along the walls, the corroded gateways, the mossy leprosy of cars, octopus-infested gardens, pines encrusted with vampire shells (sap drained, suppliant branches forming reefs); to navigate anywhere beyond this housing estate you'd have needed to be familiar with the shadows of the labyrinth, hearing the helm scraping the rooftops, the keel grating against the gutter rails. But my step was light, steady and brisk.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, My Phantom Husband

“There are times when you wake at dawn and check your neck for the marks of the vampire, those two little red dots, your pupils still contracted with hate, muscles weary from the struggle.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, My Phantom Husband

“I've tried acupuncture. An old Chinese doctor stuck needles in my skeptical ankle and told me to lie down. The table was hard. I was cold. I fell asleep immediately. When he woke me twenty minutes later, I was astonished. Unfortunately, this extraordinary result had absolutely no impact on my ability to sleep at night. He would have to have come every evening and jabbed needles in my ankle.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Sleepless: A Memoir of Insomnia

“eTraduire est la plus amoureuse des lectures.”
― Marie Darrieussecq

“Alas! the grim legion of sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful – but, like the Demons in whose company Afrasiab made his voyage down the Oxus, they must sleep, or they will devour us – they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Sleepless

“My husband's disappeared. He got in from work, propped his briefcase against the wall and asked me if I'd bought any bread. It must have been around half past seven.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, My Phantom Husband

“...the iniquitous intellocratic, capitalistic, multi-ethnic regime had given the Nobel Prize or whatever to this Knut character, which was indisputable proof of subversion.”
― Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales