Levy Deborah 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

How do we set about not imagining something?

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 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.

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

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.

This was the rearranged space of yesterday.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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 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....

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.

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

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

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

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

play with whatever the day brought in.

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

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.

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.

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.

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)

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

You are history

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Empathy is more painful than medusa stings.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

...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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 ...

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.

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

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.

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

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

Julieta looks at me, and then she laughs. ‘Your boundaries are made from sand, Sofia.’ ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I know that.

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

Minnen är som bomber.

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.

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

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.

British literary landscape,

She was not ready to go home and start imitating someone she used to be.

Kitty stared at the sky smashing against the mountains.

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

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.

but the phrase about the dream being over implied that something had started and had now ended. It was up to the dreamer to say it was over, no one else could say it on their behalf.

To do the things she had chosen to do in the world, she risked forfeiting her place as a wife and mother, a bewildering place haunted by all that had been imagined for her if she chose to sit in it.

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 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.

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.

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.

If I see myself as an unwilling detective with a desire for justice, does that make her illness an unsolved crime? If so, who is the villain and who is the victim? Attempting to decipher her aches and pains, their triggers

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.

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.

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.

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.

He glanced drowsily at Laura and Mitchell eating their strawberries in the sunshine and found himself about to fall asleep. It was an odd sensation, 'to find himself' about to fall into sleep. As if he could find himself anywhere at any time.

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.

Mitt problem är att jag vill röka cigarren själv och att någon annan ska tända den åt mig. Jag vill blåsa ut röken. Som en vulkan. Som ett monster. Jag vill att det ska ryka om mig. Jag vill inte vara flickan vars jobb det är att jämra sig me gäll röst på begravningar.

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.

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?

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.

You have becomes used to administering your mother's medication. So perhaps it is as if you are coming off medication, too? You are using your mother like a shield to protect yourself from making a life. Medication is a ritual which I have now erased from both your lives. Attention! You will have to invent another one.

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)

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.

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)

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?

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.

Her sad girl breath makes me dizzy.

Sometimes I would sprinkle sea salt on a wedge sour green tomato and dip it into the peppery emerald olive oil. It was as if I had struck on something good that was within my reach.

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?

The Poet wipes her eyes on the corner of my tablecloth. 'Perhaps the modern tragedy, Lapinski, is that we weep and do not know what we are weeping for. This is quite different from catharsis.' She suddenly throws back her head and roars with laughter; her gold teeth rattle

I can see from that glint in your bleary eyes you want to light your second cigar of the evening and summon a few demons. Oh don't deny it... don't deny it... like all people who feel uncomfortable in an uncomfortable world you want to make a map. Well let me tell you it is difficult to make a map in splintered times when whole worlds and histories collide.

I love him with as much protest as I can muster.

They are spirits from a dying world knotting our hair in sleep we worked hard to buy.

at that moment the girl thinks she can see twenty red parrots, wings on fire, fly into the sun, and the boy thinks he can see a rhino poke its horn through the moon

I am upset today, Lapinski, because my friend is dying... I spread my loneliness out like a fan in front of you. He is my comrade, Lapinski. Holding on to the hands of the clock with his fingertips. For me. We hang on for each other.

She waited for the storm inside her to be over. And when it was, in the parts that were torn, she planted sunflowers. She finished her cleaning, bought bread and dates, sat on benches in city parks looking at children scuff their knees in cement. Chewing the white unbleached flour of the bread she liked best, she decided that the word justice did not mean law and order, and the word opportunity did not mean organised human misery. And as she swallowed the bread she also swallowed the humility of being a confused human being; devoted herself obsessively to understanding her condition and thus the condition of others.

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.

There is a spectre inside every photograph.

To not feel at home in her family home is the beginning of the bigger story of society and its female discontents.

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

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.

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)

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.

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)

We began our visit at the archives. When we entered, the architectural plans for the crematoria were already spread out on the table. Some of these meticulous plans had been drawn by inmates, who, Robert Jan pointed out, signed them with their prison numbers, no names. All I could think of at that moment was Primo Levi’s observation about his time in Auschwitz, where a number was tattooed on his arm: “Only a man is worthy of a name.”6

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

I’ve had to rearrange my plans due to the delay.” Levi stepped into the open elevator. “Poor baby. You pushed a booty call? I’m happy to cancel my training so you can go have your regularly scheduled sex. I am a giver, after all.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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

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.

She had to admit he was quite handsome even though he was repulsive.

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

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.