The Woman Destroyed Quotes
"If you really want to communicate you manage, somehow or other."
"That moment possessed the sweet gentleness of a memory and the gaiety of a promise."
"A long life filled with laughter, tears, quarrels, embraces, confessions, silences, and sudden impulses of the heart."
"Sometimes it seems that time has not moved by at all."
"The eternal youth of the world makes me feel breathless."
"I have discovered the pleasure of having a long past behind me."
"I used to cherish schemes and promises for the future; now my feelings and my joys are smoothed and softened with the shadowy velvet of time past."
"Books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values."
"Growing old filled me with distress. But then I began to work on Montesquieu; I got Philippe through his agrégation and managed to make him start on a thesis."
"And now, if André were not so very sharply aware of his age, I should easily forget my own altogether."
"The world brings itself into being before my eyes in an everlasting present."
"Sadness can be wept away. But the impatience of delight—it is not so easy to get rid of that."
"The less I identify myself with my body the more I feel myself required to take care of it."
"When you love someone, you must give the people he loves credit for being of some value."
"What a relief! It is so tiring to hate someone you love."
"Quarrels make you feel tired: but you bawled me out very thoroughly yesterday evening, for all that."
"Nothing is the same anymore, and that's certain: not Milly, not Philippe, not André. Am I?"
"The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time."
"Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you've lost that, you've lost everything."
"Sometimes you say the cruelest things. For my part I have never wondered whether I respected you or not."
"Everything I ever wanted to be—a pilot, a racing driver, a reporter: action, adventure—they were all mere whims according to you: I sacrificed them all to please you."
"The history of mankind is very fine, true enough. It's a pity that that of men should be so sad."
"What an illusion! Sainte-Beuve's words were truer than Valéry's. 'In some parts one grows woody; in others one goes bad: never does one grow ripe.'"
"We had always looked far ahead. Should we now have to learn to live a short-term life?"
"We are together: that is our good fortune. We shall help one another to live through this last adventure, this adventure from which we shall not come back."
"The silly bastards! I drew the curtains they keep the stupid colored lanterns and the fairy lights on the Christmas trees out of the apartment but the noises come in through the walls."
"I'm clean, I'm straight, I don't join in any act: that makes them mad, they hate being seen through."
"Maybe I should meet one who would know how to love me."
"My father loved me. No one else. Everything comes from that."
"Big-time life that's me: the convertible, the apartment, the dresses, everything."
"Hell, I'm dying of thirst, I'm hungry but it would slay me to get up out of my armchair and go to the kitchen."
"A mother jealous of her daughter so now I've seen everything."
"There's no justice in the world. That's what makes me so mad—the injustice."
"Crying has comforted me and I'm beginning to feel sleepy."
"It is an astonishing setting, this rough draft of a town lying deserted here, on the edge of a village and outside the flow of the centuries."
"I traveled away, a great way off, to the shores of an unknown river; and then when I looked up there I was among these stones, far, far from my own life."
"I never part from Maurice with a light heart."
"Four-engined planes rise gently into the air—it is a long drawn-out au revoir. This jet left the ground with the violence of a last goodbye."
"Dusk is about to fall, but it is still warm. It is one of these heart-touching moments when the world is so well attuned to men that it seems impossible that they should not all be happy."
"Running away or trying to commit suicide—that’s what you have to do in our place for the judge to remember you."
"The shocking thing is that there is no place designed for these children and no staff capable of looking after them properly."
"Each of us used to be able to see entirely into the other."
"And one of the reasons—indeed the main reason—why I have not the least wish to be tied down to a job: I should find it hard to bear if I were not entirely free to help the people who need me."
"I must convince myself of that and strangle this fury that shattered me all yesterday."
"The more remote memories always seem the loveliest."
"Women who do nothing cannot bear those who work."
"Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion of them that the daughters have to conform to. Mothers accept them as they are."
"I realized that I had come here in the hope of once more finding that man so hopelessly in love: I had not seen him for years and years, although this memory lies like a transparency over all the visions I have of him."
"The going of Lucienne, his favorite, saddens him still more. Although he approves of her liking for independence, he would have preferred her to stay in Paris; he would have preferred her to read medicine and work with him."
"I shall warn Maurice—'I shall not fight with Noëllie over you.'"
"It was so like the past: I almost believed the likeness was going to bring the past to life again."
"I began to weep. He sat on the edge of the bed and took me tenderly in his arms. 'Sweetheart, my sweetheart, don’t cry. What are you crying for?'"
"When I woke up he was coming back into the bedroom, fully dressed: it was nine or thereabouts."
"I can no longer tell which is good and which is bad as far as I am concerned."
"The whole of my past life has collapsed behind me, as the land does in those earthquakes where the ground consumes and destroys itself—is swallowed up behind you as you flee."