Leïla Slimani > Quotes

“Nous ne serons heureux, se dit-elle alors, que lorsque nous n'aurons plus besoin les uns des autres. Quand nous pourrons vivre une vie à nous, une vie qui nous appartienne, qui ne regarde pas les autres. Quand nous serons libres.”
― Leïla Slimani, Chanson douce

“Solitude was like a drug that she wasn’t sure she wanted to do without.”
― Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny

“She had been in one of those sleeps so heavy they leave you feeling sad, disorientated, your stomach full of tears. A sleep so deep, so dark, that you see yourself dying, that you wake up soaked with cold sweat, paradoxically exhausted.”
― Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny

“Yeah. Maybe. But honestly, I don’t understand.’

‘You shouldn’t try to understand everything. Children are just like adults. There’s nothing to understand.”
― Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny

“People who are never satisfied destroy everything around them.”
― Sam Taylor (translator) Leïla Slimani, Adèle

“Je suis totalement consciente que si je n'avais pas été la lectrice que je suis, je ne serais pas la personne que je suis. Cela a été fondamental dans la construction de ma morale, de ce que je suis en tant que citoyenne, en tant que femme. Je sais combien le rapport qu'on peut avoir avec la littérature est charnel, à tel point que ça fait partie de vous, que ça devient un organe à part entière.”
― Leïla Slimani

“Several times during the night, she opened her eyes, unsure if an hour had passed or a month.”
― Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny

“Devenir une femme est un parcours semé d'humiliations. Face à la police, face à la justice comme dans l'espace public, être une femme est un inconvénient. Comme l'écrivait le romancier turc Livaneli dans son roman Délivrance (Gallimard), 'dans toute la Méditerranée, la notion d'honneur se situe entre les jambes des femmes.' Un poids bien lourd à porter pour la moitié de la population. Idéalisée, mythifiée, la virginité est évidemment un outil de coercition destiné à garder les femmes chez elles et à exercer sur elles une surveillance de tous les instants. Elle est un objet de préoccupation collective au lieu d'être une question d'ordre privé. Elle est aussi devenue une manne économique pour tous ceux qui pratiquent des dizaines de reconstitutions d'hymen chaque jour et pour certains laboratoires qui commercialisent de faux hymens, censés saigner le jour du rapport sexuel. La misère sexuelle, nous le verrons, est un capitalisme comme un autre.”
― Leïla Slimani, Sexe et mensonges: La vie sexuelle au Maroc

“Adèle had a child for the same reason that she got married: to belong to the world and to protect herself from other people. As a wife and mother, she is haloed with a respectability that no one can take away from her. She has built herself a refuge for her nights of anguish and a comfortable retreat for her days of debauchery.”
― Leïla Slimani, Adèle

“Je serai punie pour ça, s'entend elle penser. Je serai punie de ne pas savoir aimer.”
― Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny

“She drinks and the discomfort of living, the shyness of breathing, all this anguish dissolves in the liquid sips.”
― Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny

“Hate rises up inside her. A hate that clashes with her servile urges, her childlike optimism. A hate that muddies everything. She is absorbed by a sad, confused dream. Haunted by the feeling that she has seen too much, heard too much of other people’s privacy, a privacy she has never enjoyed herself. She has never had her own bedroom.”
― Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny

“We will, all of us, only be happy, she thinks, when we don’t need one another any more. When we can live a life of our own, a life that belongs to us, that has nothing to do with anyone else. When we are free.”
― Leïla Slimani, Lullaby

“She always liked being hungry. Feeling herself bend but not break, hearing her stomach groan emptily and then conquering her need, proving herself above all that. Thinness has become a way of life.”
― Leïla Slimani, Adèle

“Si elle avait dit oui à voix haute, si elle avait accepté de participer de plein gré à la scène d'amour, l'excitation serait retombée. Car ce qui excitait l'âme, c'était justement d'être trahie par le corps qui agissait contre sa volonté, et d'assister à cette trahison (p.125)”
― Leïla Slimani, Dans le jardin de l'ogre

“The silent apartment is completely under her power, like an enemy begging for forgiveness.”
― Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny

“Louise is a soldier. She keeps going, come what may, like a mule, like a dog with its legs broken by cruel children.”
― Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny

“disgust, by a hatred of everything: this apartment, this washing machine, this still-filthy sink, these toys that have escaped their boxes and crawled under the tables to die, the sword pointed at the sky, the dangling ear. She will be Louise, Louise pushing her fingers in her ears to stop the shouting and the crying. Louise who goes back and forth from the bedroom to the kitchen, from the bathroom to the kitchen, from the trash to the tumble dryer, from the bed to the cupboard in the entrance hall, from the balcony to the bathroom. Louise who comes back and then starts again, Louise who bends down and stands on tiptoe. Louise who takes a knife from a cupboard. Louise who drinks a glass of wine, the window open, one foot resting on the little balcony. “Come on, children. Time to take a bath.”
― Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny

“Love is only patience. A pious, fanatical, tyrannical patience. An unreasonably optimistic patience. We’re not finished.”
― Leïla Slimani, Adèle

“He’s drawn up a list of questions and scheduled thirty minutes for each interview. They have set aside their Saturday afternoon to find a nanny for their children.”
― Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny

“All over the apartment, there are lists that Myriam has written—on a paper napkin, on a Post-it, on the last page of a book. She spends her time looking for them. She is afraid to throw them away as if this might make her lose track of all the tasks she has to accomplish. She has kept some really old ones and, rereading them, she feels a nostalgia that is only intensified when she can no longer remember to what those obscure notes refer.

Pharmacy
Tell Mila Nil’s story
Reservations for Greece
Call M.
Reread all my notes
Go back to that shop. Buy the dress?
Reread Maupassant
Get him a surprise?”
― Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny

“We will, all of us, only be happy, she thinks, when we don’t need one another anymore. When we can live a life of our own, a life that belongs to us, that has nothing to do with anyone else. When we are free.”
― Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny

“She has the intimate conviction now, the burning and painful conviction that her happiness belongs to them. That she is theirs and they are hers.”
― Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny

“Paul and Myriam are overjoyed. Paul tells her with a smile that she is like Mary Poppins.”
― Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny

“She would like to drink in their innocence, their excitement, until she is intoxicated. She would like to see through their eyes when they look at something for the first time, when they understand the logic of a mechanism, expecting it to repeat itself infinitely without ever thinking of the weariness that will one day slow it down.”
― Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny

“Às quatro horas, os dias de ócio parecem intermináveis. É a meio da tarde que nos apercebemos do tempo desperdiçado, que nos inquietamos com a noite vindoura. A essa hora, temos vergonha de não servir para nada.”
― Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny

“This is what it’s like, being a mother. It makes her a bit silly sometimes. The most banal moments suddenly seem important. Her heart is stirred by the smallest things.”
― Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny

“Wafa a peur, parfois, de vieillir dans un de ce parcs. De sentir ce genoux craquer sur ce vieux bancs gelés, de n'avoir même plus la force de soulever un enfant. Alphonse va grandir. Il ne remettra plus les pieds dans un square, un après-midi d'hiver. Il ira au soleil. Il prendra des vacances. Peut-être même qu'un jouril dormira dans une des chambres du Grand Hôtel, où elle massait les hommes. Lui, qu'elle a élevé, il se fera servir par une de ses soeurs ou un de ses cousins, sur la terrasse pavée de carreaux jaunes et bleus.
"Tu vois, tout se retourne et tout s'inverse. Son enfance et ma vieillesse. Ma jeunesse et sa vie d'homme. Le destin est vicieux comme un reptile, il s'arrange toujours pour nous pousser du mauvais côté de la rampe."
La pluie tombe. Il faut rentrer.”
― Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny

“Something was dead and it wasn’t only youth or the feeling of being carefree. He wasn’t useless anymore. They needed him and he was going to have to deal with that. By becoming a father, he had acquired principles and certainties, things he had sworn never to have. His generosity had become relative. His passions had grown tepid. His world had shrunk.”
― Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny

“She looked down at her belly and then back up at her face. She wondered if she would once again become what she had been before. She was acutely aware of her own metamorphosis. She couldn't have said if this pleased her of if she was feeling nostalgic for the past. But she knew that something inside her was dying.
She had always thought that a child would cure her. She had convinced herself that motherhood was the only way out of her malaise, the sole solution that could end this perpetual flight from herself...”
― Leïla Slimani, Adèle