Irene Nemirovsky Quotes

Waiting is erotic

How sad the world is, so beautiful yet so absurd...

...for music alone can abolish differences of language or culture between two people and invoke something indestructible within them.

Deep within everyone's heart there always remains a sense of longing for that hour, that summer, that one brief moment of blossoming. For several weeks or months, rarely longer, a beautiful young woman lives outside ordinary life. She is intoxicated. She feels as if she exists beyond time, beyond its laws; she experiences not the monotonous succession of days passing by, but moments of intense, almost desperate happiness.

But what is certain is that in five, ten or twenty years, this problem unique to our time, according to him, will no longer exist, it will be replaced by others...Yet this music, the sound of this rain on the windows, the great mournful creaking of the cedar tree in the garden outside, this moment, so tender, so strange in the middle of war, this will never change, not this, this is forever.

Adieu," he said, "this is goodbye. I'll never forget you, never." She stood silent. He looked at her and saw her eyes full of tears. He turned away. At this moment she wasn't ashamed of loving him, because her physical desire had gone and all she felt towards him now was pity and a profound, almost maternal tenderness. She forced herself to smile. "Like the Chinese mother who sent her son off to war telling him to be careful 'because war has its dangers,' I'm asking you, if you have any feelings for me, to be as careful as possible with your life." Because it is precious to you?" he asked nervously. Yes. Because it is precious to me.

All the light of the day, fleeing the earth, seemed for one brief moment to take refuge in the sky; pink clouds spiralled round the full moon that was as green as pistachio sorbet and as clear as glass; it was reflected in the lake.

Important events — whether serious, happy or unfortunate — do not change a man's soul, they merely bring it into relief, just as a strong gust of wind reveals the true shape of a tree when it blows off all its leaves. Such events highlight what is hidden in the shadows, they nudge the spirit towards a place where it can flourish.

These two sections [of Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise], plus some of the author's notes, are all we have -- this in itself is a tragedy and waste of war. Had this novel been finished we would be hailing it as one of the supreme works of literature. As it stands, it is like a great cathedral gutted by a bomb. The ruined shell still soars to heaven, a reminder of the human spirit triumphing despite human destructiveness.

Paris had its sweetest smell, the smell of chestnut trees in bloom and of petrol with a few grains of dust that crack under your teeth like pepper. In the darknes the danger seemed to grow. You could smell the suffering in the air, in the silence. Everyone looked at their house and thought, "Tomorrow it will be in ruins, tomorrow I'l have nothing left.

This thing of Beauty is a Guilt forever.

When you're twenty, love is like a fever, it makes you almost delirious. When it's over you can hardly remember how it happened...Fire in the blood, how quickly it burns itself out.

After all, the three of us were young. It wasn’t just about the pleasure of the flesh. No, it wasn’t that simple. The flesh is easy to satisfy. It’s the heart that is insatiable, the heart that needs to love, to despair, to burn with any kind of fire…That was what we wanted. To burn, to be consumed, to devour our days just as fire devours the forest.

...she cried because prejudice outlives passion and because she was sentimentally patriotic.

Waiting is erotic.

The sun was shining with the kind of brilliant, silvery light you sometimes find in the middle of a truly beautiful day; an almost imperceptible iridescent mist hovered in the air and all the fresh colours of June were intensified, looked richer and softer, as if reflected through a prism.

Memories of the past would return to us more often if only we sought them out, sought their intense sweetness. But we let them slumber within us, and worse, we let them die, rot, so much so that the generous impulses that sweep through our souls when we are twenty we later call naive, foolish…Our purest, most passionate loves take on the depraved appearance of sordid pleasure.

Che cosa vuoi capire? Non c'è niente da capire, le rispose cercando di calmarla. Ci sono leggi che regolano il mondo e che non sono fatte né per noi né contro di noi. Quando scoppia il temporale, sai che il fulmine è il prodotto di due scariche elettriche opposte, le nuvole non sanno nulla di te. Non puoi prendertela con loro. Inoltre sarebbe ridicolo, non possono capirti.

When I was a boy, playing at the beach, I remember a game I loved, which was an omen of my future life. I would dig a channel with high sides in the sand for the sea to fill. But when the water flooded the path I created for it with such violence that it destroyed everything in its way: my castles made of pebbles, my dikes of sand. It swept away everything, destroying it all, then disappeared, leaving me with a heavy heart, yet not daring to ask for pity, since the sea had only responded to my call. It's the same with love. You call out for it, you plan its course. The wave crashes into your heart, but it's so different from how you imagined it, so bitter and icy.

The widespread joy that greeted Rasputin’s assassination confused me. No matter what crimes the starets had committed, I was not accustomed to the idea of rejoicing at a man’s death, even less at his murder.

St. Petersburg—“Peter” to insiders—was renamed Petrograd at the start of the war in an attempt to erase its Germanic origins. From the first months of 1915, the atmosphere in the city had changed completely.

Committees were organized, most notably a defense committee, which gathered an impressive arsenal that included silver table knives and pocket knives, not to mention fireplace pokers and curtain rods. At lunch and dinner we consumed enormous quantities of caviar and vodka, for the hotel seemed to have infinite reserves of these, though bread was beginning to grow scarce.

I read and reread these pages all day long as I sat next to the cast-iron stove. In the absence of coal, we burned wooden boards pilfered from the rubble of destroyed houses in order to keep warm in these chilly early days of spring. In times of plenty my appetite had always been small, but now I often went hungry.

And as each of these armies surged back and forth, there were unrestrained, systematic pogroms on a scale unknown. At Piatigori, for example, in June 1920, all the Jews in the city were rounded up in the synagogue, which was then sprayed with petrol and set alight. Often carried out on the excuse that they were training exercises, these atrocities were responsible for over three hundred thousand Jewish deaths.

The magazine Fantasio, where Irène took her first steps as a writer, wondered, with its habitual misogyny, “how a woman could have written a book in which there is not a single trivial remark, no softness, not an adjective too many,” delivering her sentences on the page “like a steam-hammer on the pavements.”39 Princesse Bibesco’s Les Quatre Portraits, which was published at the same time, but also the other new books written by women disappeared from the shelves within six months. Irène Némirovsky knew only too well why this was: “Young Frenchwomen have not usually had the human experiences that circumstances … have allowed me to acquire: the world of Jewish high finance with all the dramas, the bankruptcies and the catastrophes that occur daily, the journeys, revolution …”40

How did love turn into friendship within married life? When did we stop tearing each other apart and finally want each other to be happy?”78 Dominique’s questions form the subject of Deux, which was completed on the eve of 1938. With this occasionally sententious novel—“love is often merely the memory of love”79—

A man’s eyes are only wide open when he is unhappy. —Anton Chekhov, Notebooks

The occupying troops left the village on 28th June. “They had been downhearted for 24 hours, now they are gay, especially when they are together. The little darling said sadly that ‘the happy times are over.’ They are sending their parcels home. They are overexcited, that’s obvious. Admirable discipline and, I think, deep down no rebelliousness. I make an oath here and now never to heap my grudges, however justified they may be, on to a body of men, whatever their race, religion, conviction, prejudices, wrongs. I feel sorry for these poor children. But I cannot forgive individuals, those who reject me, those who coldly drop us, those who are ready to play dirty tricks on you. Those people … if I could get my hands on them one day …

Bravado? Recklessness? Irène Némirovsky was accustomed to danger, for she had experienced the Kiev pogrom, the Russian Revolution and the Finnish civil war. She had not been frightened. “I never knew peaceful times,” she explained on the radio in 1934, “I’ve always lived in anxiety and often in danger.

AT THE MOMENT of failure, it is human instinct to erect invincible barriers of hope. A feeling of unhappiness must remove these barriers one by one, and only then failure finds its way into man, straight into his very heart. Then, little by little, man recognises his enemy, calls him by his rightful name and is horrified,”1 wrote Irène Némirovsky in the first of her completed novels that she would not live to see in printed form.

Fire in the Blood (Chaleur du sang), which was begun during the boiling summer of 1941, would amount to an illustration of a famous saying of Proust’s: “We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.”13

Money rarely leads to happiness in Irène Némirovsky’s work.

How far away David, arrogant and sure of himself, seems! In early 1938, while attending a production of Golder by a Russian company at the Salle Iéna, Irène Némirovsky was struck by the character’s obduracy: “How could I have written something like that?” Money, of course, still had the same smell, but “the climate has changed a great deal.”68