Simple Passion

by Annie Ernaux

Nothing could make me lose my temper. I felt pain, sympathy, and compassion for other people.

He himself would have been astonished to find out that I never stopped thinking about him from morning to night.

My approach to works of art was purely emotional.

I reflected that there was very little difference between this reconstruction and a hallucination, between memory and madness.

Throughout this period, all my thoughts and all my actions involved the repetition of history. I wanted to turn the present back into the past, opening on to happiness.