Deborah Levy Quotes

I confess that I am often lost in all the dimensions of time, that the past sometimes feels nearer than the present and I often fear the future has already happened.

Be sure to enjoy language, experiment with ways of talking, be exuberant even when you don't feel like it because language can make your world a better place to live.

She was not a poet. She was a poem.

Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realize we don't want to hold it together.

When happiness is happening it feels as if nothing else happened before it, it is a sensation that happens only in the present tense.

I will never stop grieving for my long-held wish for enduring love that does not reduce its major players to something less than they are.

To become a WRITER I had to learn to INTERRUPT, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then LOUDER, and then to just speak in my own voice which is NOT LOUD AT ALL.

Sometimes we want to unbelong as much as we want to belong.

Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll all get home safely. But you tried and you did not get home safely. You did not get home at all.

My love for my mother is like an axe. It cuts very deep.

Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.

As much as I try to make the past keep still and mind its manners, it moves and murmurs with me through every day.

Yes, there had been many times I called my daughters back to zip up their coats. All the same, I knew they would rather be cold and free.

Anything covered is always interesting. There is never nothing beneath something that is covered.

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.

I am not okay. Not at all and haven't been for some time. I did not tell her how discouraged I felt and that I was ashamed I was not more resilient and all the rest of it which included wanting a bigger life but that so far I had not been bold enough to make a bid for things I wanted to happen and I feared it was written in the stars that I might end up with a reduced life like hers...

We have to mourn our dead, but we cannot let them take over our life.

... to be forceful was not the same as being powerful and to be gentle was not the same as being fragile...

It is dishonest to give me a poem and pretend to want my opinion when what you really want are reasons to live.

we do not have to conform to the way our life has been written for us, especially by those who are less imaginative than ourselves.

Like everything that involves love, our children made us happy beyond measure – and unhappy too – but never as miserable as the twenty-first century Neo-Patriarchy made us feel. It required us to be passive but ambitious, maternal but erotically energetic, self-sacrificing but fulfilled – we were to be Strong Modern Women while being subjected to all kinds of humiliations, both economic and domestic. If we felt guilty about everything most of the time, we were not sure what it was we had actually done wrong." (from "Things I Don't Want to Know" by Deborah Levy)

The young woman was a window waiting to be climbed through. A window that she guessed was a little broken anyway.

I was flesh thirst desire dust blood lips cracking feet blistered knees skinned hips bruised, but I was so happy not to be napping on a sofa under a blanket with an older man by my side and a baby on my lap.

The fact that lipstick and mascara and eye shadow were called 'Make Up' thrilled me. Everywhere in the world there were made up people and most of them were women.

How do we set about not imagining something?

My problem is that I want to smoke the cigar and for someone else to light it. I want to blow out smoke. Like a volcano. Like a monster. I want to fume. I do not want to be the girl whose job it is to wail in a high-pitched voice at funerals.

I have been waiting on her all my life. I was the waitress. Waiting on her and waiting for her. What was I waiting for? Waiting for her to step into her self or step out of her invalid self. Waiting for her to take the voyage out of her gloom, to buy a ticket to a vital life.

It would take a while for me not to think of the Greek language as the father who walked out on me

That night, in the deep heat of Greece, devoured by mosquitoes and reminiscences, I was thinking about all the doors I had closed in my life and what it would have taken to keep them ajar.

I had energy because I had no choice but to have energy. I had to write to support my children and I had to do all the heavy lifting. Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.

History is the dark magician inside us, tearing at our liver. (Deborah Levy, Hot Milk, p. 185)

Smoking cheap Spanish filthy sock-tobacco under a pine tree was so much better than trying to hold it together on escalators. There was something comforting about being literally lost when I was lost in every other way...

I have always wanted to go to Trieste because it sounds like tristesse, which is a light-hearted word, even though in French it means sadness. In Spanish it is tristeza, which is heavier than French sadness, more of a groan than a whisper.

In fact I would be content to live in a humble wooden cabin on the edge of an ocean or a lake, but somehow I looked down on myself for not having a bigger dream.

The story in this book was about a woman who has gifted her life to a man. This is not something to be tried at home but it is usually where it happens.

It's hard to write and be open and let things in when life is tough, but to keep everything out means there's nothing to work with.

We did not yet entirely understand that Mother, as imagined and politicized by the Societal System, was a delusion. The world loved the delusion more than it loved the mother.

I have never got a grip on when the past begins or where it ends, but if cities map the past with statues made from bronze forever frozen in one dignified position, as much as I try to make the past keep still and mind its manners, it moves and murmurs with me through every day.

It is so mysterious to want to suppress women. It is even more mysterious when women want to suppress women. I can only think we are so very powerful that we need to be suppressed all the time.

It was not that easy to convey to him, a man much older than she was, that the world was her world, too. He had taken a risk when he invited her to join him at his table. After all, she came with a whole life and libido of her own. It had not occurred to him that she might not consider herself to be the minor character and him the major character. In this sense, she had unsettled a boundary, collapsed a social hierarchy, broken with the usual rules.

It is very simple to be happy, but it is very difficult to be simple.

She knew she never wanted children or to serve his breakfast or run his errands or pretend she was not intellectually engaged with the world to make herself more loveable to him.

Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure the heart.

This was the rearranged space of yesterday.

Beckett described sorrow becoming ‘a thing you can keep adding to all your life … like a stamp or an egg collection’.

I knew I wanted to be a writer more than anything else in the world, but I was overwhelmed by everything and didn’t  know where to start.

It was true that I had no idea how to endure being alive and everything that comes with it.

In the new quiet I heard the sea as if my ears were laid against the ocean floor. I could hear everything. The rumbling earthquake of a ship and spider crabs moving between weeds.

Life ia only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll al get home safely.

It was not that easy to convey to him, a man much older than she was, that the world was her world too.

They would be enchanted beginners all over again, ... . That was the best thing to be in life.

What is worse? To be chained all day with a bowl of water, or to be free and die of thirst?

As Simone de Beauvoir had told us, women are not supposed to eclipse men in a world in which success and power are marked out for them. It is not easy to take up the historic privilege of dominance over women... if he is economically dependent on her talents. At the same time, she receives the fatal message that she must conceal her talents and abilities in order to be loved by him.

I am not okay. Not at all and haven´t been for some time. I did not tell her how discouraged I felt and that I was ashamed I was not more resilient an all the rest of it which included wanting a bigger life but that so far I had not been bold enough to make a bid for things I wanted to happen....

The unloved watch the loved perform the small rituals of their loving.

We're kissing in the rain.' Her voice was hard and soft at the same time. Like the velvet armchairs. Like the black rain inked on his hand.

She is the wanderer, bum, émigré, refugee, deportee, rambler, strolling player. Sometimes she would like to be a settler, but curiosity, grief, and disaffection forbid it.

Time has shattered, it's cracked like my lips.

I was also searching for a house in which I could live and work and make a world at my own pace, but even in my imagination this home was blurred, undefined, not real, or not realistic, or lacked realism.

The phantom of femininity is an illusion, a delusion, a societal hallucination. She is a very tricky character to play and it is a role (sacrifice, endurance, cheerful suffering) that has made some women go mad.

Now that we were mothers we were all shadows of our former selves, chased by the women we used to be before we had children.

Bengali philosopher, poet and composer Rabindranath Tagore: It is very simple to be happy, but it is very difficult to be simple.

I can't stand THE DEPRESSED. It's like a job, it's the only thing they work hard at.

play with whatever the day brought in.

Her taste for symmetry and structure, it helped her thoughts drift. Symmetry did not chain her, it set her free. (p. 85)

I had lost my job. I was no longer officially a minor historian. Perhaps I was history itself, flailing around in a number of directions, sometimes all of them at the same time.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

She had no God to plead to for mercy or luck. It would be true to say she depended instead on human kindness and painkillers.

My words were smaller than my feelings at that moment. I had spent my life finding diplomatic words. Am I a diplomat then? Isn’t it hard enough to play Beethoven

To unfold any number of ideas through all the dimensions of time is the great adventure of the writing life. But I had nowhere to write.

I wasn’t sure my skeletal system had found a way of walking freely in the Societal System

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 had 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.

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.

That was the old composition and I had walked out of that world. I had literally walked off the stage.

We were doing everything we could to avoid the moment we would both go our separate ways.

Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll all get home safely.

Has anyone ever actually told you how up yourself you are?

To use the language of a war correspondent, which was, she knew, what Isabel Jacobs happened to be, she would have to say thay Kitty Finch was smiling at her with hostile intent.

Can we accept that language is sacred and scared and it's scarred as well, because that's how we all are?

I want to get away from the kinship structures that are supposed to hold me together. To mess up the story I have been told about myself. To hold the story upside down by its tail.

Couples were always keen to return to the task of trying to destroy their lifelong partners while pretending to have their best interests at heart.

You are history

Capitalism sold a flat white to me as if it were a cup of freedom.

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be

I wanted my whole life so far to slip away with the rolling waves, to begin a different kind of life. But I didn't know what that meant or how to get to it

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.

Loners are the opposition. Pensive, thoughtful and furious, marooned with stories that need to be spoken out loud and no one to listen, curries to be cooked and no one to taste, days and days of traffic signals to be manoeuvred and no one to congratulate except other loners: they find each other because like all good maps there are familiar signs that lead the way. The loner who both observes and creates worlds necessarily speaks with many tongues. It is with these tongues that she explores the contours of the centre and the margins, the signs for somewhere and elsewhere and here and now.

What is a sigh? That would be another good subject for a field study. Is it just a long, deep, audible exhalation of breath? Rose's sigh was intense but not subdued. It was frustrated but not yet sad. A sigh resets the respiratory system so it was possible that my mother had been holding her breath, which suggests she was more nervous than she appeared to be. A sigh is an emotional response to being set a difficult task.

It was very urgent that I got out of my life. Inside the greasy spoon's steamed up windows and haze of cigarette smoke, this sense of urgency accelerated. I had so little time. Time for what? I didn't know but I was convinced there was another sort of life waiting for me and I had to work out what it was before I cleaned the oven.

We Germans invented all the big movements of the twentieth century. Phenomenology from Heidegger and Hegel, communism from Marx and Engels. So you will have to excuse us for being a little stiff in our limbs – we have been busy.

She is drinking peach tea in the plaza and she is too hot because her blue and black checked shirt is for winter not for summer in Andalucía. I think she thinks she’s a cowboy in her work shirt, always alone with no one to look at the mountain horizon at night and say my god those stars.

I have researched aboriginal culture, Mayan hieroglyphics and the corporate culture of a Japanese car manufacturer, and I have written essays on the internal logic of various other societies, but I haven't a clue about my own logic.

You get tragedy when the tree, instead of bending, breaks.

It smelt of coconut ice cream and sweat and the Mediterranean sea. I

Next year he would suggest they hire a chalet on the edge of an icy fjord in Norway, as far away from the Jacobs family as possible.

She is dark. He is fair. She comes from there. He comes from here. They like each other. It is an easy and lovely lust ...

We have travelled a long distance from the cow with a bucket of raw milk under its udder. We are a long way from home.’ This

I might one day risk falling in love again, but I was not going to lose my heart to the cardiologist.

Empathy is more painful than medusa stings.

I had broken the rules of exchange. She had given and I had taken, but I had not reciprocated. A gift like love is never free.

The writing life is mostly about stamina. To get to the finishing line requires the writing to become more interesting than everyday life...

To become the person someone else had imagined for us is not freedom – it is to mortgage our life to someone else’s fear.

Each new journey is a mourning for what has been left behind. The wanderer sometimes tries to recreate what has been left behind, in a new place.

It was a big release from the terror of death to finally acknowledge that it is also always absurd.

Perhaps the secret cost of true love is that it has to be free to fly away. And to return.

The face beneath the mask has to grow seamlessly into the mask.

It was hard to accept that the first man in my life would do things that were to my disadvantage if they were to his advantage. Yet it was a revelation that somehow set me free.

He doesn’t care about his own life so he doesn’t care about the lives of others.

It seemed that acquiring a house was not the same thing as acquiring a home. And connected to home was a question I swatted away every time it landed too near me. Who else was living with me in the grand old house with the pomegranate tree? Was I alone with the melancholy fountain for company? No. There was definitely someone else there with me, perhaps even cooling their feet in that fountain. Who was this person? A phantom.

He wore a delicate ring with a tiny sleepy diamond embedded in the latticed gold band. He said, "My wife chose this wedding ring for me. It's Victorian, not really my style, but it reminds me of her." And then he said, "My wife crashed the car again." Ah, I thought, as we walked past the golden trees, she does not have a name. She is a wife. I wondered why my male colleague often forgot the names of most of the women he met at social events. He would always refer to them as someone's wife or girlfriend, as if that was all I needed to know. If we don't have names, who are we?

I felt at ease with myself, which must have meant that she did not regard me as strange and so I had no reason to imitate someone who was less strange and had been saved from doing the chameleon thing.

I can't stand THE DEPRESSED. It's like a job, it's the only thing they work hard at. Oh good my depression is very well today. Oh good today I have another mysterious symptom and I will have another one tomorrow. The DEPRESSED are full of hate and bile and when they are not having panic attacks they are writing poems. What do they want their poems to DO? Their depression is the most VITAL thing about them. Their poems are threats. ALWAYS threats. There is no sensation that is keener or more active than their pain. They give nothing back except their depression. It's just another utility. Like electricity and water and gas and democracy. They could not survive without it.

When a female writer walks a female character into the center of her literary enquiry (or a forest) and this character starts to project shadow and light all over the place, she will have to find a language that is in part to do with unknotting the ways in which she has been put together by the Societal System in the first place. She will have to be canny in how she sets about doing this because she will have many delusions of her own. In fact it would be best if she was uncanny.

Gómez had suggested I steal a fish to achieve more courage and purpose. I regarded this task as an anthropological experiment, though it crossed a border into something approaching magic, or perhaps magical thinking. When I googled how to gut a fish, there were over 9 million results.

He did not ask me one single question, not even my name. It seemed that what he needed was a devoted, enchanting woman at his side to acquire his canapes for him and who understood that he was entirely the subject.

I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalysed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it.

To strip the wallpaper off the fairy tale of The Family House in which the comfort and happiness of men and children have been the priority is to find behind it an unthanked, unloved, neglected, exhausted woman. It requires skill, time, dedication and empathy to create a home that everyone enjoys and that functions well. Above all else, it is an act of immense generosity to be the architect of everyone else's well-being. This task is still mostly perceived as women's work. Consequently, there are all kinds of words used to belittle this huge endeavour.

She swallows and swallows the water. And as she swallows she swallows the possibility she will always be alone. Swallows the river that will flow into the sea that is made from other waters that have flowed from mountains and hills, that will leak into oceans. She swallows geography, learns to swim in changing tides and temperatures, learns different strokes of the arms and legs, learns to speak in many tongues. She does this because she has no choice but to do so, and she comes out of the river to find him there, holding her earrings in his hand, and he says, ‘But they don’t fit. Who are you?’" (from "Swallowing Geography" by Deborah Levy)

There are vertical swimmers and horizontal swimmers, she said. I myself have sometimes thought I will become a vertical swimmer. No one says I have to do the third act of my life. It is always nasty. If I become ill in old age, I have not ruled it out.

Mother was The Woman the whole world had imagined to death. It proved very hard to re-negotiate the world's nostalgic phantasy about our purpose in life...we did not yet entirely understand that Mother, as imagined and politicized by the societal system, was a delusion.

So do you anthropologists study primitive people?’ ‘Yes, but the only primitive person I have ever studied is myself.

that most of us don’t go through with it, but we have at least walked our minds on this forbidden pasture and let them graze there?

her voice is gentle. rain does that to voices, makes them intimate and suggestive.

I wanted to die of shame but everyone insisted on keeping me alive. I had to live.

A life without swimming every day was not a life I wanted.

A female writer cannot afford to feel her life too clearly. If she does, she will write in a rage when she should write calmly.

Words can cover up everything that matters.

To separate from love is to live a risk-free life. What’s the point of that sort of life?

Afterwards, I will have to tie the trees to bamboo poles so the wind will not determine their shape. A tree cannot be given form by the vagaries of the wind.

It is a disappointment to me to spawn a child who feels so deeply. I would like to refute the idea that to feel somehow makes you a better person.

The arrogance of metaphor when facts save people's lives. The succour of metaphor when facts inadequately describe people's lives.

...she had gone too far into the unhappiness of the world to start all over again.

...knowledge would not necessarily serve them, nor would it make them happy. There was a chance it would instead throw light on visions they did not want to see.

She wanted to escape from a reality that was so rational it was a little bit mad.

Sometimes, I find myself limping. It's as if my body remembers the way I walk with my mother. Memory is not always reliable. It is not the whole truth. Even I know that.

She was not a poet. She was a poem. She was about to snap in half. He thought his own poetry had made her la la la la love him. It was unbearable.

The truth was her husband had the final word because he wrote words and then he put full stops at the end of them. She knew this, but what did his wife know?

To unfold any number of ideas through all the dimensions of time is the great adventure of the writing life.

Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely.

Rose rested her pink eyes on my eyes. I removed my gaze like a traitor.

My mother’s words are my mirror. My laptop is my veil of shame. I hide in it all the time.

life. I did not wish to restore the past. What I needed was an entirely new composition.

Truth is not always the most entertaining guest at the dinner table, and anyway, as Duras suggests, we are always more unreal to ourselves than other people are.

I realized my mother had charm and verve. If I blew on her name, ROSE, the letters would shuffle around and come out as EROS, the god of love, winged but lame.

Freud described this wish to unknow what we know as motivated forgetting.

It is not enough to feel love. More important is how we express love.

To separate from love is to live a risk-free life. What’s the point of that sort of life? As I wheeled my electric bike through the park on the way to my writing shed, my hands had turned blue from the cold. I had given up wearing gloves because I was always grappling in the dark for keys. I stopped by the fountain, only to find it had been switched off. A sign from the council read, This fountain has been winterized. I reckoned that is what had happened to me too.

It occurred to me that both Maria and I were on the run in the twenty-first century, just like George Sand whose name was also Amantine was on the run in the nineteenth century, and Maria whose name was also Zama was looking for somewhere to recover and rest in the twentieth. We were on the run from the lies concealed in the language of politics from myths about our character and our purpose in life. We were on the run from our own desires too probably, whatever they were.

Yes, well, it's two contradictory thoughts, she said, the possibility of ending my life and wanting more life. So what? And here are two more contradictions: I don't believe in God, but I talk to something like God. I ask this presence to feel for me when I have cut down my own feelings.

I pursue my case, Monsieur, I speak English, Italian and German, and I want justice in all three languages. I have been damaged by unlove. It makes at inappropriate moments when I should be dignified.

I wasn’t in the mood to talk. The mournful sound of the rubber wheels of the tea trolley squeaking on the lino floor was the right soundtrack for the end of the world. Sometimes the tea lady lost her grip and the trolley hit the corners of the walls and beds. It was the equivalent of waterfalls and parrots in my new terrible world.

The moody politics of the moderns home had become complicated and confusing. There were many modern and apparently powerful women I knew who had made a home for everyone else, but did not feel at home in their family home.

I can't stand THE DEPRESSED. It's like a job. It's the only thing they work hard at. Oh good my depression is very well today. Oh good today I have another mysterious symptom and I will have another one tomorrow. The DEPRESSED are full of hate and bile and when they are not having panic attacks they are writing poems. What do they want their poems to DO? Their depression in the most VITAL thing about them. Their poems are threats. ALWAYS threats. There is no sensation keener or more active than their pain. They give nothing back except their depression. It's just another utility. Like electricity and water and gas and democracy. They could not survive without it.

The house with the pomegranate tree was my major acquisition. In this sense, I owned some unreal estate. The odd thing was that every time I tried to see myself inside this grand old house, I felt sad. It was as if the search for home was the point, and now that I had acquired it and the chase was over, there were no more branches to put in the fire.

The scale of her belly and breasts was not unlike early fertility goddesses found in Greece around 6000 BC, except they did not wear polka-dot aprons. Did they suffer from hypochondria? Hysteria? Were they bold? Lame? Too full of the milk of human kindness?

dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.

When a female writer walks a female character in to the centre of her literary enquiry (or a forest) and this character starts to project shadow and light all over the place, she will have to find a language that is in part to do with learning how to become a subject rather than a delusion, and in part to do with unknotting the ways in which she has been put together by the societal system in the first place.

As I bit into the sweet orange flesh of the apricot, I found myself thinking about some of the women, the mothers who had waited with me in the school playground while we collected our children. Now that we were mothers we were all shadows of our former selves, chased by the women we used to be before we had children. We didn’t really know what to do with her, this fierce, independent young woman who followed us about, shouting and pointing the finger while we wheeled our buggies in the English rain. We tried to answer her back but we did not have the language to explain that we were not women who had merely ‘acquired’ some children – we had metamorphosed (new heavy bodies, milk in our breasts, hormonally programmed to run to our babies when they cried) into someone we did not entirely understand." (from "Things I Don't Want to Know" by Deborah Levy)

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.

He lifted his arm that had been resting on her shoulders and gazed at the words she had written on his hand. He had been branded as cattle are branded to show whom they belong to. The cold mountain air stung his lips. She was driving too fast on this road that had once been a forest. Early humans had lived in it. They studied fire and the movement of the sun. They read the clouds and the moon and tried to understand the human mind His father had tried to melt him into a Polish forest when he was five years old. He knew he must leave no trace or trail of his existence because he must never find his way home. That was what his father had told him. You cannot come home. This was not something possible to know but he had to know it all the same

Mother was The Woman the whole world had imagined to death. It proved very hard to re-negotiate the world’s nostalgic phantasy about our purpose in life. The trouble was that we too had all sorts of wild imaginings about what Mother should ‘be’ and were cursed with the desire to not be disappointing. We did not yet entirely understand that Mother, as imagined and politicised by the societal system, was a delusion. The world loved the delusion more than it loved the mother.

I thought so. Anything covered is always interesting. There is never nothing beneath something that is covered. As a child, I used to cover my face with my hands so that no one would know I was there. And then I discovered that covering my face made me more visible because everyone was curious to see what it was I wanted to hide in the first place.

A história neste livro era sobre uma mulher que oferece a sua vida a um homem. Não se deve tentar isso em casa, mas é normalmente aí que acontece.

É difícil reivindicar fragilidade e força em igual proporção, mas é essa mistura que nos constitui a todos

She was hysterically happy and I was calmly miserable

She does not tell him that she has been standing outside the city of Roma, watching and talking to him over the wall.

Time has shattered, it’s cracking like my lips.

عندما أقبل ابنتي قبل أن تنام في الليل، وأتمنى لها أحلاما سعيدة فهي تفهم أن أمنيتي لها لطيفة، لكن تعلم أيضا كما يعلم جميع الأطفال أنه من المستحيل أن يملي عليهم الآباء أنواع أحلامهم.

Beautiful breath beautiful breath beautiful breath. I loved every part of her.

Tears fall from his eyes and arrange themselves on his cheek like Man Ray tears.

British literary landscape,

In her view, this is because a man’s love of a woman is not what gives him his self-worth. I was no longer interested in exploring this kind of dynamic in

Fiction is a wonderful home for the reach of the mind.

That spring when life was very hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn’t see where there was to get to, I seemed to cry most on escalators at train stations. Going down them was fine but there was something about standing still and being carried upwards that did it. From apparently nowhere tears poured out of me and by the time I got to the top and felt the wind rushing in, it took all my effort to stop myself from sobbing. It was as if the momentum of the escalator carrying me forwards and upwards was a physical expression of a conversation I was having with myself. Escalators, which in the early days of their invention were known as ‘travelling staircases’ or ‘magic stairways’, had mysteriously become danger zones.

I have been making footprints in the dust and glitter of the virtual universe. It never occurred to me that, like the medusa, technology stares back and that its gaze might have petrified me, made me fearful to come down, down to Earth, where all the hard stuff happens, down to the check-out tills and the barcodes and the too many words for profit and the not enough words for pain.

Orwell, in his 1936 essay "Shooting an elephant", noted that an imperialist 'wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it'. The wife also wears a mask and her face grows to fit it, in all its variations.

J.K. watches a storm rage into the crimson afternoon. The sky is electric. Rain whips her bare arms and legs. Dustbins are hauled into the air, caught on the wind’s curve. Bags and pillowcase unpacked for a while, toothbrush, perfume, books, a little pile of yellow feathers, J.K. knows she too is caught in the wind. She is Europe’s eerie child, and she is part of the storm." (from "Swallowing Geography" by Deborah Levy)

The foreigner, the stranger, he too must learn to make a forgery of himself. He posed to value originality, but the truth is we want to be like each other. We even want our differences to be the same differences.

There is nothing that feels as good as breathing near someone you desire. The past of my youth was not a good place to be. Is it strange then, that I am attracted to a woman who is obsessed with digging up the past?

Brillo pads were evil because they were not just squares of scratchy material with pink detergent stuck to a piece of felt on the end. As far as I was concerned, they had been designed to waste the lives of girls and women.

I took the risk of being mocked on buses and in the streets of the suburbs in which I lived. The secret message that lurked in the zips of my silver platform boots was that I did not want to be like the people doing the mocking.

I was thinking of Hecate at the crossroads with her burning torches and keys, Medusa with her snakes and fatal gaze, Artemis with her hunting dogs and deer, Aphrodite with her doves, Demeter with her mares, Athena with her owl. Whenever I saw eccentric and sometimes mentally fragile older women feeding pigeons on the pavement of every city in the world, I thought, Yes, there she is, she is one of those cut-down goddesses who has become demented by life.

Byłam cielesnością, pragnieniem, żądzą, pyłem, krwią, spękanymi ustami, pokrytymi pęcherzami stopami, otartymi kolanami, stłuczonymi biodrami, lecz byłam też szczęśliwa, że nie drzemię na sofie pod kocem ze starcem u boku i dzieckiem na kolanach.

No wonder women told him their thoughts like they told no other man. Rabah admired their bodies and laughed at their jokes. He looked like what he was a desired and much loved man with light in his eyes and money in the bank. But he also hurt women. I have seen them weep over Rabah because he removed his affection and attention and the light in his eyes shone on someone else. How was it that he could love me one day and not love me the next? What do you do with the love you feel if it is not returned?

Like everything that involves love, our children made us happy beyond measure – and unhappy too – but never as miserable as the twenty-first century Neo-Patriarchy made us feel. It required us to be passive but ambitious, maternal but erotically energetic, self-sacrificing but fulfilled – we were to be Strong Modern Women while being subjected to all kinds of humiliations, both economic and domestic. If we felt guilty about everything most of the time, we were not sure what it was we had actually done wrong.

Don’t fly away. We are where we are. We are where we are, I repeated. And where are you, Elsa? Perhaps there was no one in the world who better understood me. And misunderstood me. His main task when I was a child was to focus my wandering attention. His question went back a long way. Now I heard it as a refrain, a repeated musical phrase. I’m here with you, I replied. My words were muffled under the mask. It began to dawn on me, at that moment, that I was going to lose him. It didn’t matter if I wore a mask.

Elisa and I, the last two smokers on earth, sit under the bay tree, listening to our cats purr while they sharpen their claws and lick each other clean. My new wife plays with my fingers and the sun, which is setting, prints colour into the concrete towerblocks.

Her narrow silhouette and the nuggets of antique silver on her wrists fascinate and perturb him. But the little girl?He'd show the princess the back of his hand and make her yelp. The Inspector's shoes press angrily into the gravel path as he walks to his car.

We agreed that whatever happened next in the world, we would still rub conditioner into our hair after we washed it and comb it through to the ends, we would soften our lips with rose-, strawberry-, and cherry-scented balms, and though we would be interested to see a wolf perched in a lonely mountain, we liked our household animals to betray their savage nature and live with us in our reality, which was not theirs. They would lie in our laps and let us stroke them through waves of virus, wars, drought and floods and we would try not to transmit our fear to them.

In Western European realist fiction, what is a writer going to do (we wondered out loud) with the irrational, with synchronicities, with superstition and the private magic we invent to keep us out of harm’s way, with the uncanny, with thought streams and digressions that contradict our attempt to fix the story?

I would like to forget the image of the ship’s crane at Southampton docks when it lifted into the sky the three wooden trunks which held all that my family owned. There is only one memory I want to preserve. It is Maria, who is also Zama, sipping condensed milk on the steps of the doep at night. The African nights were warm. The stars were bright. I loved Maria but I’m not sure she loved me back. Politics and poverty had separated her from her own children and she was exhausted by the white children in her care, by everyone and everything in her care. At the end of the day, away from the people who stole her life’s energy and made her tired, she had found a place to rest, momentarily, from myths about her character and her purpose in life." (from "Things I Don't Want to Know" by Deborah Levy)

I want you to be someone else.' 'Who do you want me to be?' 'I want you to be kind and wise. I want you to be a father who loves his children. I want you to be attentive to me and faithful for ever. I want you to always fancy me and respect and admire me and I want you to be older and more confident.' 'But I'm not,' Pavel says. 'I'm not a father. I'm not very wise.' 'I know.' Ella turns away from him.

One of these men told me at a book festival that if he did not transgress too many boundaries in his marriage, there would always be a comforting pair of slippers warming for him by the fire...Will there ever be a comforting pair of slippers (pink, feathered) warming for me by the egg-shaped fireplace? Not unless I became a female character in a vintage Hollywood movie and paid a housekeeper to put them there.

Cuando una mujer tiene que encontrar una forma nueva de vivir y rompe con la historia social que ha borrado su nombre, se espera que se odie a sí misma atrozmente, que enloquezca de dolor, que llore arrepentida. Son las joyas reservadas para ella en la corona del patriarcado, siempre a su disposición. No faltan las lágrimas, pero es mejor atravesar la oscuridad negra y azulada que quedarse con esas joyas que nada valen

Naomi said to Simon Tegala: It's over between us. I can't believe you wanted more sex magic because you think your father is dying. Simon Tegala's heart has two chambers: the upper chamber and the lower chamber. Blood flows between these chambers. Simon Tegala's heart is the size of his fist. What were you thinking, his ex-girlfriend shouts as she slams the door. Simon Tegala says, SHAKING. I was thinking about SHAKING.

That night I dreamt (again) of Poland. In this recurring dream I am in Warsaw on a train to Southend-on-Sea. There is a soldier in my carriage. He kisses his mother's hand and then he kisses his girlfriend's lips. I am watching him in the old mirror attached to the wall of our carriage and I can see he has a humped back under his khaki uniform. When I wake up there are always tears on my cheeks, transparent as vodka but warm as rain.

It was not that easy to convey to him, a man much older than she was, that the world was her world too. He had taken a risk when he invited her to join him at his table. After all, she came with a whole life and libido of her own. It had not occurred to him that she might not consider herself to be the minor character and him the major character. In this sense, she had unsettled a boundary, collapsed a social hierarchy, broken with the usual rituals

We said Yes in all the European languages. Yes. We said yes we said yes, yes to vague but powerful things, we said yes to hope which has to be vague, we said yes to love which is always blind, we smiled and said yes without blinking. I wished my mother could hear us say yes and I thought about the stories she told me when I was a child and walked on garden walls that seemed so high but she always said yes, yes climb up and walk on that wall, I will hold your hand and tell you about the skyscrapers of Chicago.

I am looking into your eyes and I can't get in. You have changed the locks and I have an old key that doesn't fit and our daughter is making her way across the garden towards us, holding her thick blanket. You are telling me you are dead, and I say yes, I know you are. We miss you and since you've been gone I've forgotten all my pin numbers, I can't remember the code to my gym locker or where the honey is or where I put the blue pillowcase-- and could you tell me, again, where exactly the sea is, in that photograph?

I bought the air freshener for four euro because it was a kind of artefact translated into many languages, and also because it was clearly an interpretation of a woman ( breasts belly apron eyelashes) and I had becomes confused by the signs for servicios in public places. I could not figure out why one sign was male and the other female. The most common stick figure sign was not particularly male or female. Did I need this aerosol to make things clearer to me? What kind of clarity was I after? I had conquered Juan who was Zeus the thunderer as far as I was concerned, but the signs were all mixed up because his job in the injury hut was to tend the wounded with his tube of ointment. He was maternal, brotherly, he was like a sister, perhaps paternal, he had become my lover. Are we all lurking in each other's sign? Do I and the woman on the air freshener belong to the same sign? Another aeroplane was flying above the market, it's metal body heavy in the sky. A male pilot I had met in the Coffee House had told me that an aircraft was always referred to as 'she'. His task was to keep her in balance, to make her a extension of his hands, to make her responsive to the lightest of touch. She was sensitive and needed to be handled delicately. A week later, after we had slept together, I discovered that he was also responsive to the lightest of touch. It wasn't clarity I was after. I wanted things to be less clear.