Sweet Days of Discipline Quotes

“I still thought that to get something you had to go straight for your goal whereas it is only distractions, uncertainty, distance that bring us closer to our targets, and then it is the targets which strike us.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“What are the girls thinking of? At least half are nostalgic for death, and for a temple, and for all of those clothes.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“Inside, a mother superior, ethereal, delicate, who took me under her wing. She caressed me with her slender, soft hands, she sat next to me as if I were a friend. One day she disappeared. In her place arrived a buxom Swiss from Canton Uri. It's common knowledge that a new leader will hate the predecessors' favourites. A boarding school is like a harem.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“The wind wrinkled the dark lake and my thoughts as it swept on the clouds, chopped them up with its hatchet; between them you could just glimpse the Last Judgement, finding each of us guilty of nothing.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“The bell rings, we get up. The bell rings again, we go to bed. We retire to our rooms; we saw life pass by beneath our windows, observed it in books and on our walks, watched the seasons change. It was always a reflection, a reflection that seemed to freeze on our windowsills... We imagined the world. What else can we imagine now if not our own deaths? The bell rings and it's all over.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“Cuando se está allí dentro, una imagina cosas grandiosas sobre el mundo, y cuando sale, a veces desearía volver a oír el sonido de la campana.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“I knew Frédérique wouldn't write. But I persevered in the pleasure of taking my sadness to the limit, the way one does with some practical joke. The pleasure of disappointment. It wasn't new to me. I had been relishing it ever since I was eight years old, a boarder in my first, religious, school. And perhaps they were the best years, I thought. Those years of discipline. There was a kind of elation, faint but constant throughout all those days of discipline, the sweet days of discipline.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“Hemos imaginado el mundo. ¿Qué otra cosa puede imaginarse si no es la propia muerte? El sonido de una campana y todo ha terminado.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“La vida para mí se hacía demasiado larga. La literatura, por sí sola, no me distraía.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“She was one of those girls who should have had a different life.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“I feel, as one does with the dead, that I've left something unfinished, a conversation, and we go on with that conversation, addressing ourselves to the dead, even if a certain haziness of memory clouds our wake over these conversations we never had. If their faces are forgotten, if certain features have faded, as in a painting, all that remains are our own voices, which we feel can't be answered. Yet, from somewhere, the dead do answer. Or they refuse to out of spite. Like stubborn schoolgirls who won't speak. We go on speaking. We are aware of moving our lips, though there is no one here.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“These moments seem so long, the lightly waiting as, before falling asleep, you have to invite a dream to come.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“Both of us wore signet rings on our little fingers.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“We, perhaps, were still innocent. And perhaps innocence has something crude, pedantic and affected about it, as if we were all dressed in plus fours and long socks.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“I declared myself, I declared my love. More than to her I spoke to the landscape. The train looked like a toy, it left. ‘Ne sois pas triste.’ She left me a note. I had lost what was most important in my life, the sky was still blue, oblivious, everything yearned for peace and happiness, the landscape was idyllic, like idyllic, desperate adolescence. The landscape seemed to protect us, the small white houses of Appenzell, the fountain, the sign Töchterinstitut, it was as if the place hadn’t been affected by human distortions. Can one feel disorientated in an idyll? An atmosphere of catastrophe covered the land-scape. The irremediable came home to me in one of the most beautiful, transparent days of the year.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“And aren’t they our forerunners too somehow, these anonymous people we find in photographs? At least for those of us who spent our best years as boarders. We find our sisters in their faces. A strange familiarity binds us together, a cult of the dead. All those girls we knew have infiltrated our minds, become a tribe; and they come back to us in a sort of posthumous flowering. Perched like stylites on our brows, sleeping in a row of beds. I see my little companions from when I was eight years old, in bright white sheets, with their smiles, their lowered eyelids; their gaze has slipped away. We shared our beds with them. In prisons too, the prisoners don’t forget their cellmates. They are faces that both fed and devoured our brains, our eyes. There is no time, at that time. Childhood is ancient.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“I understood those children who jump from the top floor of a school simply to do something disordered, and I told her. Order was like ideas, something you possessed, something that possessed you.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“Our minds are a series of graves in a wall. Our non-entities are all there when the register is called, gluttonous creatures; sometimes they fly up like vultures to hide the faces of those we loved. A multitude of faces dwell in the graves, a rich pasturage.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“Todavía hoy no logro expresar con palabras que me había enamorado de Frédérique; es una frase muy fácil de decir.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“Habría podido escribir una novela de amor con sequedad de corazón, como una anciana que recordara.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“Desde el día en que entramos en el Bausler Institut no hicimos más que pensar en el día que saldríamos.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

“Sui prati scoscesi volavano bassi i corvi, deformi, va na gloriosi, crudeli. Li avevi paragonati alla nostra adolescenza, mentre cercavano, nella terra intorno al collegio, dove mettere gli artigli.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline