Édouard Louis > Quotes

“For the ruling class, in general, politics is a question of aesthetics: a way of seeing themselves, of seeing the world, of constructing a personality. For us it was life or death.”
― Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père

“Among those who have everything, I have never seen a family go to the seashore just to celebrate a political decision, because for them politics changes almost nothing. This is something I realized when I went to live in Paris, far away from you: the ruling class may complain about a left-wing government, they may complain about a right-wing government, but no government ever ruins their digestion, no government ever breaks their backs, no government ever inspires a trip to the beach. Politics never changes their lives, at least not much. What’s strange, too, is that they’re the ones who engage in politics, though it has almost no effect on their lives. For the ruling class, in general, politics is a question of aesthetics: a way of seeing themselves, of seeing the world, of constructing a personality. For us it was life or death.”
― Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père

“The things we remember most clearly are always those that bring us shame.”
― Édouard Louis, Histoire de la violence

“What we call history is nothing but the story of the same emotions, the same joys, reproduced across bodies and time”
― Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père

“You were as much a victim of the violence you inflicted as of the violence you endured.”
― Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père

“There is a will that exists, a desperate, continual, constantly renewed effort to place some people on a level below you, not to be on the lowest rung of the social ladder.”
― Édouard Louis, The End of Eddy

“I’ve been trying to construct a memory that would let me undo the past, that would amplify it and destroy it, so that the more I remember and the more I lose myself in the images that remain, the less they have to do with me.”
― Édouard Louis, Histoire de la violence

“It took me a long time to understand that she wasn't being incoherent or contradictory, but rather that it was I myself, arrogant class renegade that I was, who tried to force her discourse into a foreign kind of coherence, one more compatible with my values—that incoherence appears to exist only when you fail to reconstruct the logic that lies behind any given discourse or practice. I came to understand that many different forms of discourse intersected in my mother and spoke through her, that she was constantly torn between her shame at not having finished school and her pride that even so, as she would say, she'd 'made it through and had a bunch of beautiful kids,' and that these two modes of discourse existed only in relation to each other.”
― Édouard Louis, En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule

“Maybe what she meant was that obviously she wasn't a lady because there was no way she could be. To be ordinary, as if pride were not the first manifestations of shame.”
― Édouard Louis, The End of Eddy

“Where is history? The history they taught at school was not your own. We were learning world history, and you were left out.”
― Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père

“Last month, when I came to see you, you asked me just before I left, Are you still involved in politics? The word still was a reference to my first year in high school, when I belonged to a radical leftist party and we argued because you thought I’d get myself into trouble if I took part in illegal demonstrations. Yes, I told you, more and more involved. You let three or four seconds go by. Then you said, You’re right. You’re right — what we need is a revolution.”
― Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père

“Although she is an angry woman, she is not one who knows what to do with the hatred that never leaves her.”
― Édouard Louis, En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule

“I’m sorry, monsieur, but now this is a criminal proceeding. It’s out of your hands.” That night I didn’t understand how my story could stop belonging to me”
― Édouard Louis, Histoire de la violence

“She was certain that she deserved another life, one
that existed somewhere else, abstractly, in a virtual
world that could so easily have been hers, and that her life in the real world was nothing but an accident.”
― Édouard Louis, A Woman’s Battles and Transformations

“She would tell me stories about the family or about the neighbors, but I'd never listen. I'd complain: Stop talking so much! I couldn't see that she spoke to ease the boredom, the precise duplication of hours and days that life with my father imposed upon her, and that for her, as it would be for me many years later, the telling of her life's story was the best remedy she could think of to help her bear the weight of her existence.”
― Édouard Louis, A Woman’s Battles and Transformations

“Il me semble souvent que je t'aime”
― Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père

“People always think their own lives are so fascinating, and yes they realize everyone else thinks the same, but still they tell themselves that everyone else is wrong and they’re right.”
― Édouard Louis, Histoire de la violence

“When December comes, you say you wish the holidays were already over and done with and well behind us, and I think you pretend to hate happiness in order to make yourself believe that, if your life seems an unhappy one, at least you’re the one who chose it. As if you wanted to pretend you had some control over your own unhappiness. As if you wanted to give the impression that, if your life was too hard, you wanted it that way, out of disgust with pleasure, out of a loathing for joy.”
― Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père

“f we look at politics as the government of some living people by other living people, as well as the existence of individuals within communities not of their choosing, then politics is what separates some populations, whose lives are supported, nurtured, protected, from other populations, who are exposed to death, to persecution, to murder.”
― Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père

“I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone, but for me when the process of my transformation began it was more than just a conscious effort, it became a permanent obsession.”
― Édouard Louis, Change

“De mi infancia no me queda ningún recuerdo feliz. No quiero decir que no haya tenido nunca, en esos años, ningún sentimiento feliz o alegre. Lo que pasa es que el sufrimiento es totalitario: hace desaparecer todo cuanto no entre en su sistema”
― Édouard Louis, En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule

“(...) comme si la jeunesse n'était en rien une données biologique, une simple question d'âge ou de moment de la vie, mais plutôt une sorte de privilège réservé à ceux qui peuvent - de par leur situation - jouir de toutes ces expériences, de tous ces affects que l'on regroupe sous le nom d'adolescence.”
― Édouard Louis, En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule

“Drinking brought oblivion. The world was responsible, but how could you blame the world, the world that imposed a life that the people around us had no choice but to try to forget — with drinking, by drinking.”
― Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père

“I started this book wanting to tell the story of a woman, but I've realized that yours is the story of a human being who fought for the right to exist as a woman, as opposed to the nonexistence imposed upon you by your life, and by life with my father.”
― Édouard Louis, Combats et métamorphoses d'une femme

“I wanted to change everything, and I wanted everything about my change to be the result of a decision. I wanted nothing to escape my willpower.”
― Édouard Louis, Change

“I'd gotten so used to seeing her unhappy at home that the joy on her face seemed scandalous to me, a deceit, a lie that had to be exposed as soon as possible.”
― Édouard Louis, Combats et métamorphoses d'une femme

“Macron, Hollande, Valls, El Khomri, Hirsch, Sarkozy, Bertrand, Chirac. The history of your suffering bears these names. Your life story is the history of one person after another beating you down. The history of your body is the history of these names, one after another, destroying you. The history of your body stands as an accusation against political history”
― Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père

“Your father doesn't want to go into his past because the past reminds him that he could have become a different person, and didn't.”
― Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père

“La bourgeoisie allait au theatre ou à l'opéra, nous, c'était le supermarché qui nous faisait rêver.”
― Édouard Louis, Changer : méthode

“your back had been mangled by the factory, mangled by the life you were forced to live, by the life that wasn’t yours, that wasn’t yours because you never got to live a life of your own, because you lived on the outskirts of your life — because of all that you stayed at home, and usually they were the ones who came over.”
― Édouard Louis, Qui a tué mon père