Irène Némirovsky > Quotes

“Waiting is erotic”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

“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.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

“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.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

“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.”
― Irène Némirovsky

“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.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

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

“How sad the world is, so beautiful yet so absurd...”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Francaise

“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.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

“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.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

“...for music alone can abolish differences
of language or culture between two people and invoke something indestructible within them.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

“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.”
― Irène Némirovsky

“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.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Fire in the Blood

“Waiting is erotic. ”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Francaise

“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.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

“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.”
― Irène Némirovsky

“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.”
― Irène Némirovsky

“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.”
― Irène Némirovsky

“This thing of Beauty is a Guilt forever.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

“Heureux sont ceux qui peuvent aimer et haïr sans feinte, sans détour, sans nuance.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

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

“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.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Fire in the Blood

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

“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-...”
― Irène Némirovsky

“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”
― Irène Némirovsky

“- Però per què em dius tot això? Jo odio el meu passat! L'odio!
- Perquè ell és tu i tu ets ell.”
― Irène Némirovsky, maître des âmes: roman

“And aren't the most beautiful follies the ones linked to love?”
― Irène Némirovsky, Fire in the Blood

“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».”
― Irène Némirovsky, Les Feux de L Automne

“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.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Fire in the Blood

“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.”
― Irène Némirovsky, maître des âmes: roman