Irene-Nemirovsky Quotes

“Waiting is erotic”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“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 happinness.”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“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.”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

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

— Irene-Nemirovsky

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.

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“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.”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

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

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“When I was born I was so surprised I didn't talk for a year and a half.”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

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

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“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.”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

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.

— Irene-Nemirovsky

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.

— Irene-Nemirovsky

Because all happiness is contagious, and disarms the spirit of hatred.

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“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.”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“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.”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“They felt a strange happiness, an urgent need to reveal their hearts to each other- the urgency of lovers, which is already a gift, the very first one, the gift of the soul before the body surrenders. 'Know me, look at me. This is who I am. This is how I have lived, this is what I have loved. And you? What about you, my darling?”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“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.”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

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

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“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.”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

The tender June day persisted, refusing to die. Each pulse of light was fainter and more exquisite than the last, as if bidding farewell to the earth, full of love and regret.

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“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.”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“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- ...”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

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

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“This thing of Beauty is a Guilt forever.”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

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.

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“He hated the war; it threatened much more than his lifestyle or peace of mind. It continually destroyed the world of the imagination, the only world where he felt happy.”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“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.”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

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

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“Evil is visible, it burns, it smugly displays itself for all to see.”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“Mothers and women in love: both ferocious females.”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

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

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“An enemy soldier never seemed to be alone
one human being like any other
but followed, crushed from all directions by innumerable ghosts, the missing and the dead. Speaking to him wasn't like speaking to a solitary man but to an invisible multitude; nothing that was said was either spoken or heard with simplicity: there was always that strange sensation of being no more than lips that spoke for so many others, others who had been silenced.”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

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.

— Irene-Nemirovsky

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.

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“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.”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

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

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“So what? German or French, friend or enemy, he's first and foremost a man and I'm a woman. He's good to me, kind, attentive ... that's good enough for me. I'm not looking for anything else. Our lives are complicated enough with all these wars and bombings. Between a man and a woman, none of that's important. I couldn't care less if the man I fancy is English or black - I'd still offer myself to him if I got the opportunity.”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

Then a dark shape would glide across the star-covered sky, everyone would look up and the laughter would stop. It wasn't exactly what you'd call fear, rather a strange sadness
a sadness that had nothing human about it any more, for it lacked both courage and hope. This was how animals waited to die. It was the way fish caught in a net watch the shadow of the fisherman moving back and forth above them.

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“No one quite knew why, but they felt light-hearted. Maybe it was because of the beautiful weather. The sky, so blue, seemed gently to bow down towards the horizon and caress the earth.”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“For there comes a time in life when the pity previously reserved only for children takes on a different form, a time when we study the faces of 'old people' and sense that one day we will be just like them. And that is the moment when early childhood comes to an end.”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“Believe me, my boy, women don't love a man for himself but as a weapon against other women.”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

Where do we find happiness? We pursue it, search for it, kill ourselves trying to find it, and all the time it's just here ... It comes just when we've stopped expecting anything, stopped hoping, stopped being afraid.

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“How tolerable misfortunes appear when they affect only other people! How strong the human body seems when it's another man's flesh that bleeds! How easy it is to look death in the face when it's another man's turn!”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“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”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“Now she mocked and berated herself fiercely. She was mad. She, a woman of twenty, had behaved like a little twelve-year-old child. 'But I'm not a woman,' she thought. 'There are people who are ageless, and I'm one of them. I was an old woman at twelve, and even when I have white hair I'll be exactly the same in my heart as I am today. Why be ashamed of it?”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“We're becoming slaves; the war scatters us in all directions, takes away everything we own, snatches the bread from out of our mouths; let me at least retain the right to decide my own destiny, to laugh at it, defy it, escape it if I can. A slave? Better to be a slave than a dog who thinks he's free as he trots along behind his master. She listened to the sound of men and horses passing by. They don't even realise they're slaves, she said to herself, and I, I would be just like them if a sense of pity, solidarity, the "spirit of the hive" forced me to refuse to be happy.”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“She was approaching the hardest moment to be faced when separated from the one you love, the moment when you finally get used to your pain, and then, you are only half alive, because that pain meant you were still fully alive. It was a bleeding, gasping kind of life.”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“But why are we always the ones who have to suffer?" she cried out in indignation. "Us and people like us? Ordinary people, the lower middle classes.”

— Irene-Nemirovsky

“Such madness. When you're 20, 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 out.”

— Irene-Nemirovsky