The Life of Irene Nemirovsky Quotes

“Fire in the Blood (Chaleur du sang), which was begun during the boiling summer of 1941, would amount to an illustration of a famous saying of Proust’s: “We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.”13”
― Olivier Philipponnat, The Life of Irene Nemirovsky: 1903-1942

“The occupying troops left the village on 28th June. “They had been downhearted for 24 hours, now they are gay, especially when they are together. The little darling said sadly that ‘the happy times are over.’ They are sending their parcels home. They are overexcited, that’s obvious. Admirable discipline and, I think, deep down no rebelliousness. I make an oath here and now never to heap my grudges, however justified they may be, on to a body of men, whatever their race, religion, conviction, prejudices, wrongs. I feel sorry for these poor children. But I cannot forgive individuals, those who reject me, those who coldly drop us, those who are ready to play dirty tricks on you. Those people … if I could get my hands on them one day …”
― Olivier Philipponnat, The Life of Irene Nemirovsky: 1903-1942

“AT THE MOMENT of failure, it is human instinct to erect invincible barriers of hope. A feeling of unhappiness must remove these barriers one by one, and only then failure finds its way into man, straight into his very heart. Then, little by little, man recognises his enemy, calls him by his rightful name and is horrified,”1 wrote Irène Némirovsky in the first of her completed novels that she would not live to see in printed form.”
― Olivier Philipponnat, The Life of Irene Nemirovsky: 1903-1942

“A man’s eyes are only wide open when he is unhappy. —Anton Chekhov, Notebooks”
― Olivier Philipponnat, The Life of Irene Nemirovsky: 1903-1942

“Bravado? Recklessness? Irène Némirovsky was accustomed to danger, for she had experienced the Kiev pogrom, the Russian Revolution and the Finnish civil war. She had not been frightened. “I never knew peaceful times,” she explained on the radio in 1934, “I’ve always lived in anxiety and often in danger.”
― Olivier Philipponnat, The Life of Irene Nemirovsky: 1903-1942

“How did love turn into friendship within married life? When did we stop tearing each other apart and finally want each other to be happy?”78 Dominique’s questions form the subject of Deux, which was completed on the eve of 1938. With this occasionally sententious novel—“love is often merely the memory of love”79—”
― Olivier Philipponnat, The Life of Irene Nemirovsky: 1903-1942

“How far away David, arrogant and sure of himself, seems! In early 1938, while attending a production of Golder by a Russian company at the Salle Iéna, Irène Némirovsky was struck by the character’s obduracy: “How could I have written something like that?” Money, of course, still had the same smell, but “the climate has changed a great deal.”68”
― Olivier Philipponnat, The Life of Irene Nemirovsky: 1903-1942

“Money rarely leads to happiness in Irène Némirovsky’s work.”
― Olivier Philipponnat, The Life of Irene Nemirovsky: 1903-1942

“The magazine Fantasio, where Irène took her first steps as a writer, wondered, with its habitual misogyny, “how a woman could have written a book in which there is not a single trivial remark, no softness, not an adjective too many,” delivering her sentences on the page “like a steam-hammer on the pavements.”39 Princesse Bibesco’s Les Quatre Portraits, which was published at the same time, but also the other new books written by women disappeared from the shelves within six months. Irène Némirovsky knew only too well why this was: “Young Frenchwomen have not usually had the human experiences that circumstances … have allowed me to acquire: the world of Jewish high finance with all the dramas, the bankruptcies and the catastrophes that occur daily, the journeys, revolution …”40”
― Olivier Philipponnat, The Life of Irene Nemirovsky: 1903-1942

“And as each of these armies surged back and forth, there were unrestrained, systematic pogroms on a scale unknown. At Piatigori, for example, in June 1920, all the Jews in the city were rounded up in the synagogue, which was then sprayed with petrol and set alight. Often carried out on the excuse that they were training exercises, these atrocities were responsible for over three hundred thousand Jewish deaths.”
― Olivier Philipponnat, The Life of Irene Nemirovsky: 1903-1942