Eleanor

“After Duras wrote Lol Stein, she made a curious remark - she said that she gave herself permission to speak 'in a sense totally alien to women'. I know what she means. It is so hard to claim our desires and so much more relaxing to mock them.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography

“When our father does the things he needs to do in the world, we understand it is his due. If our mother does the things she needs to do in the world, we feel she has abandoned us. It is a miracle she survives our mixed messages, written in society's most poisoned ink. It is enough to drive her mad.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography

“When happiness is happening it feels as if nothing else happened before it, it is a sensation that happens only in the present tense.”
― Deborah Levy, Things I Don't Want to Know

“Everything was calm. The sun was shining. I was swimming in the deep. And then, when I surfaced 20 years later, I discovered there was a storm, a whirlpool, a blasting gale lifting the waves over my head.
At first I wasn’t sure I’d make it back to the boat and then I realised I didn’t want to make it back to the boat. Chaos is supposed to be what we most fear but I have come to believe it might be what we most want. If we don’t believe in the future we are planning, the house we are mortgaged to, the person who sleeps by our side, it is possible that a tempest (long lurking in the clouds) might bring us closer to how we want to be in the world.
Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realise we don’t want to hold it together.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography