Deborah Levy The Cost Of Living Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Words can cover up everything that matters.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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