Les corps des hommes ont des formes avares, internées.

You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they’re simply unbearable.

Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we’ve ever met.

What could Maria call the time that opened ahead of her? The certainty of her hope? This rejuvenated air she was breathing? This incandescence, this bursting of a love at last without object?

…as long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn’t happened.

I know it’s not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction of costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don’t know where....

I think about you. But I don’t say it anymore.

Paradoxically, the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognizes...

You think of outside your room, of the streets of the town, the lonely little squares over by the station, of those winter Saturdays all alike.

It has been my face. It’s got older still, or course, but less, comparatively, than it would otherwise have done. It’s scored with deep, dry wrinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasn’t collapsed,...

The woman is the home. That’s where she used to be, and that’s where she still is. You might ask me, What if a man tries to be part of the home — will the...

« L’écrit ça arrive comme le vent, c’est nu, c’est de l’encre, c’est l’écrit, et ça passe comme rien d’autre ne passe dans la vie, rien de plus, sauf elle, la vie. »

The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.

Pourquoi nier l’évidente nécessité de la mémoire?

Writing was the only thing that populated my life and made it magic.

He says he’s lonely, horribly lonely because of this love he feels for her. She says she’s lonely too. She doesn’t say why.

I often think of the image only I can see now, and of which I’ve never spoken. It’s always there, in the same silence, amazing. It’s the only image of myself I like, the only...

When it’s in a book I don’t think it’ll hurt any more …exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them.

You ask: Why is the malady of death fatal? She answers: Because whoever has it doesn’t know he’s a carrier, of death. And also because he’s like to die without any life to die to,...

Que la vida es inmortal mientras se vive, mientras se está con vida. Que la inmortalidad no es una cuestión de más o menos tiempo, que no es una cuestión de inmortalidad, que es una...

I want to write. I’ve already told my mother: That’s what I want to do-write. No answer the first time. Then she asks, Write what? I say, Books, novels. […] She’s against it, it’s not...