Irène Némirovsky > Quotes

“Waiting is erotic”
― irene nemirovsky, 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.”
― Irene Nemirovsky, Suite Francaise

“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.”
― Irene Nemirovsky, Jezebel

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

“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, Suite Francaise

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

“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

“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.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

“When you love someone as much as that, you don't believe they can die. You think your love protects them.”
― Irène Némirovsky, The Wine of Solitude

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

“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, Suite Française

“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?”
― 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.”
― Irene Nemirovsky, Suite Française

“...because all happiness is contagious, and disarms the spirit of hatred.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

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

“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.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Fire in the Blood

“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, Fire in the Blood

“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

“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

“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.”
― Irène Némirovsky, The Wine of Solitude

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

“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.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

“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.”
― Irene Nemirovsky, Fire in the Blood

“I keep telling you, you don't pay enough attention to the minor characters. A novel should be like a street full of strangers, where no more than two or three people are known to us in depth.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

“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

“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.”
― 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.”
― Irene Nemirovsky

“This thing of Beauty is a Guilt forever.”
― Irene Nemirovsky, Suite Française

“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.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

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