Thérèse et Isabelle Quotes

“We embraced again, we wanted to engulf each other. We had cast off our families, the world, time, certainty. Clasping her against my gaping open heart, I wanted to draw Isabelle inside. Love is an exhausting invention. Isabelle, Thérèse, I pronounced in my head, getting used to the magical simplicity of our two names.”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse and Isabelle

“I contemplated her, I was remembering her in this present, I had her beside me from last moment to last moment. When you are in love you are always on a railway platform.”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse et Isabelle

“It’s incredible,” she sighed. My eyebrows brushed Isabelle’s eyebrows. “It’s incredible the way I’m seeing you,”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse et Isabelle

“Her name, my devotion.”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse and Isabelle

“she was releasing me from a world I had never lived in to launch me into one I could not yet inhabit.”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse and Isabelle

“A caress is to a shiver as dusk is to a lightning flash.”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse et Isabelle

“Isabelle pulled me backwards, she laid me down across the eiderdown, lifted me, held me in her arms: she was releasing me from a world I had never lived in to launch me into one I could not yet inhabit. With her lips she parted mine, moistened my clenched teeth. The fleshiness of her tongue frightened me: the foreign sex did not enter. I waited, withdrawn, contemplative. The lips wandered over my lips: a dusting of petals. My heart was beating too loudly and I wanted to listen to this seal of sweetness, this soft new tracing. Isabelle is kissing me, I tell myself.”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse and Isabelle

“Thirty days I’ve been a passenger at the school. I want to live here, I want to polish my shoes in the shoe room.”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse and Isabelle

“Isabelle was deceiving me, Isabelle fascinated me, Isabelle was starving me.”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse and Isabelle

“It’s too stupid. A moment ago we understood each other.” “Now we don’t understand each other at all,”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse and Isabelle

“She was my body’s secret muse.”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse and Isabelle

“She had made her honey on my lips, the sphinxes had gone to sleep once more.”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse and Isabelle

“Dateci i vostri brandelli, stagioni. Saremo le vagabonde dai capelli laccati dalla pioggia. Vuoi, Isabelle, vuoi venire a vivere con me sull'orlo di una scarpata? [...] Ti spoglierò nei campi di grano, ti farò dormire nei covoni, ti coprirò nell'acqua sotto i rami bassi, ti curerò sul muschio delle foreste, ti prenderò nell'erba medica, ti isserò sui carri di fieno, mia donna carolingia.”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse et Isabelle

“Ses lèvres cherchaient des Thérèse dans mes cheveux, dans mon cou, dans les plis de mon tablier, entre mes doigts, sur mon épaule. Que ne puis-je me reproduire mille fois et lui donner mille Thérèse. Je ne suis que moi-même. C'est trop peu.”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse et Isabelle

“Quand on aime on est toujours sur le quai d'une gare.”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse et Isabelle

“Thérèse and Isabelle formed the first section of a novel, Ravages, which Leduc presented to the publisher Gallimard in 1954. Judged ‘scandalous’, this work was censored by the publisher.”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse and Isabelle

“This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.”
― Violette Leduc, Thérèse and Isabelle