Sarah Elder > Sarah's Quotes

“I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Being beautiful, was that for men?'
'Yes. Some women say that it is for ourselves. What on earth can we do with it? I could have loved myself whether I was hunchbacked or lame, but to be loved by others, you had to be beautiful.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“My memory begins with my anger.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Perhaps you never have time when you are alone? You only acquire it by watching it go by in others".”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Sometimes, I used to sit under the sky, on a clear night, and gaze at the stars, saying, in my croaky voice: “Lord, if you’re up there somewhere, and you aren’t too busy, come and say a few words to me, because I’m very lonely and it would make me so happy.” Nothing happened. So I reckon that humanity— which I wonder whether I belong to —really had a very vivid imagination.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Is there a satisfaction in the effort of remembering that provides its own nourishment, and is what one recollects less important than the act of remembering? That is another question that will remain unanswered: I feel as though I am made of nothing else.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Inevitably, with memory comes pain.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“There's no continuity and the world I have come from is utterly foreign to me. I haven't heard its music, I haven't seen its painting, I haven't read its books... I know only the stony plain, wandering, and the gradual loss of hope. I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct. Perhaps, somewhere, humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silence. There is nothing we can do about it.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“I thought it was unfair, and then I understood that, alone and terrified, anger was my only weapon against the horror”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“One after the other, they were buried under that sky and neither they nor I knew if it was the one under which we'd been born.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“I cannot mourn for what I have not known.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“I felt a surge of grief, I, who had never known men, as I stood in front of this man who had wanted to overcome fear and despair to enter eternity upright and furious.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“in the face of horror, ancient rituals regained their meaning”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“But I had only known the absurd, and I think that made me profoundly different from them”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“even a person raised in captivity learns to want, yearns to see beyond their cage. How much of our humanity is intrinsic? How much remains, when all else is stripped away?”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before reading, because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“It is strange that I am dying from a diseased womb, I who have never had periods, I who have never known men.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Sometimes the women pitied me, saying that at least they'd known real life, and I was very jealous of them, but they died, as I am about to die, and what does having lived mean once you are no longer alive?”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Even now, I like to look in the mirror. Over the years, I’ve followed the progress of the wrinkles furrowing my brow. My cheeks have grown thinner and my lips have become pale, but it’s all me and I feel a sort of fondness for the reflection in the mirror. [...] I was just over forty. That was twenty-two years ago. I suppose I am an old woman, but I still love looking at my face. I don’t know if it’s beautiful or ugly, but it is the only human face I ever see. I smile at it and receive a friendly smile back.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“The alternation of day and night is merely a physical phenomenon, time is a question of being human and, frankly, how could I consider myself a human being, I who have only known thirty-nine people and all of them women? I think that time must have something to do with the duration of pregnancies, the growth of children, all those things that I haven’t experienced. If someone spoke to me, there would be time, the beginning and end of what they said to me, the moment when I answered, their response. The briefest conversation creates time. Perhaps I have tried to create time through writing these pages. I begin, I fill them with words, I pile them up, and I still don’t exist because nobody is reading them. I am writing them for some unknown reader who will probably never come—I am not even sure that humanity has survived that mysterious event that governed my life. But if that person comes, they will read them and I will have a time in their mind. They will have my thoughts in them. The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before reading, because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking. I will only be truly dead if nobody ever comes, if the centuries, then the millennia go by for so long that this planet, which I no longer believe is Earth, no longer exists. As long as the sheets of paper covered in my handwriting lie on this table, I can become a reality in someone’s mind. Then everything will be obliterated, the suns will burn out and I will disappear like the universe.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“It wasn't necessary for me to stop Anthea's heart. Each death had contributed a little to killing her. There had been so much hope when we'd escaped from the prison, and then the slow dissipation, the gradual abandonment of all expectations, a defeat that had killed everything without a battle. She wondered when it had dawned on us that we were as much prisoners out in the open as we had been behind bars.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Whether it was their fault or not, they’d gone mad by force of circumstance, they’d lost their reason because nothing in their lives made sense any more.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“We came to the conclusion that they left you here because any decision can be analysed, and that their lack of decision indicated the only thing they wanted us to know, which is that we must know nothing.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“If the only thing that differentiates us from animals is the fact that we hide to defecate, then being human rests on very little, I thought.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“It is impossible to predict what might happen in a world where you don't know the rules.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“It was only at the moment of death that they admitted their despair and rushed headlong towards the great, dark doors that I opened for them, leaving the sterile plain where their lives had gone awry without a backward glance, eager to embrace another world which perhaps didn’t exist, but they preferred nothingness to the futile succession of empty days.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“He is half of my soul, as the poets say.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“When he died, all things soft and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I am made of memories.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles