Irene Nemirovsky

“En kvinne bør ligne på en kvige: øm, tillitsfull og frodig, med en kropp så hvit som fløte - en hud som gamle skuespillerinner, skjønner dere, en hud som er myk av massasje og gjennomtrengt av sminke og pudder.”

“Jeg har alltid sagt at du ikke legger tilstrekkelig vekt på bifigurene. En roman skal ligne en gate full av ukjente, hvor to-tre personer man kjenner til bunns, går forbi. Ikke flere. Se på andre forfattere, som Proust - de visste å gjøre bruk av bifigurene. De bruker dem for å ydmyke hovedpersonene og gjøre dem mindre. Det finnes ikke noe mer helsebringende i en roman enn å gi heltene en slik leksjon i ydmykhet. Tenk på de små bondekonene i Krig og fred, de som krysser veien foran vognen til fyrst Andrej og ler. De er de første som ser ham, han snakker til dem, rett inn i ørene deres, og dermed løfter leserens blikk seg, nå blir det bare ett eneste ansikt, en eneste sjel.”

“Hun likte å le, og hun syntes synd på folk - Dickens-siden ved deg, vesle mor, pleide han å si.”

“Barna står ved kirkeporten. Gå og hent dem der. De som har mistet barna sine, kan gå og hente dem ved kirken.”

“Hun ba for de døde og sendte lykkønskningsbrev til de levende hver gang det var bryllup eller barnedåp - akkurat som engelskmennene i koloniene, som drakk seg fulle i all ensomhet hver gang London feiret dronningens fødselsdag.”

“De tilhørte nemlig den klassen av det franske høyborgerskapet som heller vil se barna sine uten brød, kjøtt og luft enn uten eksamenspapirer.”

“The way a man drinks in company tells you nothing about him, but the way he drinks when alone reveals, without his realizing it, the very depths of his soul.”

“Men who loved you when you were twenty, and who continue to see you the way you looked then are impossible to replace.”

“Tutto era meglio della musica, perché solo la musica abolisce le differenze di lingua o di abitudini fra due esseri e tocca fibre sensibilissime.”

“Dopo tutto, si giudicano gli altri solo in base al proprio cuore: l’avaro vede sempre la gente spinta dall’interesse, il lussurioso dall’ossessione del desiderio.”

“Ma perché a noi tocca sempre soffrire? Alla gente come noi, alla gente comune, ai piccoli borghesi? Quando arriva una guerra, o il franco è in ribasso, o ci sono disoccupazione, crisi e rivoluzioni, gli altri se la cavano sempre. E siamo noi a pagare! Perché? Che cosa abbiamo fatto? Paghiamo per gli errori di tutti. Certo, di noi nessuno ha paura!”

“Come sempre all’indomani di ogni catastrofe, ci sarebbero stati nuovi ricchi, uomini pronti a comprare il piacere pagandolo a caro prezzo, perché il loro era denaro facile, ottenuto senza fatica, e l’amore sarebbe stato sempre lo stesso.”

“When older people get together there is something unflappable about them; you can sense they’ve tasted all the heavy, bitter, spicy food of life, extract its poison, and will now spend ten or fifteen years in a state of perfect equilibrium and enviable morality. They are happy with themselves. They have renounced the vain attempts of youth to adapt the world to their desires. They have failed and now, they can relax. In a few years they will once again be troubled by a great anxiety, but this time it will be a fear of death; it will have a strange effect on their tastes, it will make them indifferent, or eccentric, or moody, incomprehensible to their families, strangers to their children. But between the ages of forty and sixty they enjoy a precarious sense of tranquility.”

“But she loved studying and books, the way other people love wine for its power to make you forget. What else did she have? She lived in a deserted, silent house. The sound of her own footsteps in the empty rooms, the silence of the cold streets beyond the closed windows, the rain and the snow, the early darkness, the green lamp beside her that burned throughout the long evenings and which she watched for hours on end until its light began to waver before her weary eyes: this was the setting for her life.”

“After all, people judge one another according to their own feelings. It is only the miser who sees other enticed by money, the lustful who see others obsessed by desire.”

“What separates or unites people is not their language, their laws, their customs, their principles, but the way they hold their knife and fork.”

“And besides, in the end, perhaps love demands marble palaces, white peacocks and swans.”

“When you love someone as much as that, you don't believe they can die. You think your love protects them.”

“...because all happiness is contagious, and disarms the spirit of hatred.”

“Quite apart from the fact that we usually pay so dearly for our follies, we should be generous about them, to ourselves and others. Yes, we always pay for them, and sometimes the smallest indiscretions cost as much as the largest.”

“And aren't the most beautiful follies the ones linked to love?”

“- Però per què em dius tot això? Jo odio el meu passat! L'odio!- Perquè ell és tu i tu ets ell.”

“Sonrieron. Se entendían bien. No sólo los unía la carne, el pensamiento, el amor; además, habían nacido en el mismo puerto de Crimea, hablaban la misma lengua, se sentían hermanos. Habían bebido en la misma fuente, compartido un pan amargo.”

“The breath of wind that moved them was still chilly on this day in May; the flowers gently resisted, curling up with a kind of trembling grace and turning their pale stamens towards the ground. The sun shone through them, revealing a pattern of interlacing, delicate blue veins, visible through the opaque petals; this added something alive to the flower's fragility, to it's ethereal quality, something almost human ,in the way that human can mean frailty and endurance both at the same time. The wind could ruffle these ravishing creations but it couldn't destroy them, or even crush them; they swayed there, dreamily; they seemed ready to fall but held fast to their slim strong branches-...”

“Нищо не е по-ужасно от това да нямаш пари. Нищо не е по-грозно, по-срамно, по-непоправимо от бедността!”

“Sie arbeiteten, lasen, gingen herum, aßen, organisierten Spiele, Darbietungen, aber nur ein Teil ihrer selbst handelte; der andere schlief einen schmerzhaften Schlaf und würde erst an dem gesegneten Tag (doch wann würde er kommen? Wann?) erwachen, an dem man ihnen sagte: «Jetzt ist es soweit, es ist vorbei».”

“Heureux sont ceux qui peuvent aimer et haïr sans feinte, sans détour, sans nuance.”

“Her grandfather's books [...] opened before Ada, a world whose colours were so dazzling that reality paled in comparison and faded away. Boris Godunov, Satan, Athalia, King Lear: they all spoke words charged with meaning; every syllable was inexpressively precious”

“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.”

“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.”

“Waiting is erotic”

“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.”

“...for music alone can abolish differencesof language or culture between two people and invoke something indestructible within them.”

“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.”

“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.”

“My God! What is this country doing to me? Because it has rejected me, let us consider it coldly, let us watch it lose the honour and its life.”

“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.”

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

“This thing of Beauty is a Guilt forever.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”