The Fawn Quotes

“It was some time ago that you talked about it, and you never once noticed that every time you mentioned her name it went through me like a knife, like an electric shock, and that I struck back, not always according to the rules, but I really wanted it to hurt. Why did you think I did that? Because I felt shamed by her? Or guilty? Why did every mention of her name drive me almost mad?”
― Magda Szabó, The Fawn

“I suddenly realised she was playing Chopin's Scherzo in B Flat Minor and I closed my eyes to hide the tears; when the interval came Pipi kissed me on both cheeks – he was always so grateful when anyone praised his mistresses. We went down to talk to her, she simpered prettily, looked very pleased with herself and flirted with him, and when he told her that she had made me cry she blushed with pleasure, I smiled and shook hands with her, and he grinned with delight; I looked at him as if he were an idiot: he had never seen my mother at the piano, with her mane of black hair flowing down over her shoulders, playing by the light of two tiny candles – they were cheaper than electricity – while the room smelled of cooking fat. The supper often burned as I stood entranced because she was playing Chopin.”
― Magda Szabó, The Fawn

“I kept my eyes closed so that I wouldn't miss anything, and so that I could follow you blindly by touch alone into a place where I had never been before.”
― Magda Szabó, The Fawn

“I have always distrusted good people. I never believed as a child that goodness came naturally. I always suspected that beneath it lay some sort of payment for services past or still to come.”
― Magda Szabó, The Fawn

“I had always wanted brothers and sisters, so that I wouldn't have to do everything myself.”
― Magda Szabó, The Fawn

“You said that no-one had ever liked you for what you really were, you were always playing a role to make people accept you, but with me you stood up straight and didn't feel you had to sing if you wanted to show me your teeth, like the wolf in the story.”
― Magda Szabó, The Fawn

“I just stared at them, I had no idea what to say to them, I don't know how to talk to flowers.”
― Magda Szabó, The Fawn

“One half of my heart leaped up at the thought that you were deceiving her by coming to the theatre, the other half hated you because you slept in the same bed as she did, drank from the same glass and bathed in the same bathtub. I hated you because in your moments of intimacy you would have had special names for each other that no-one else knew, and that one day, in a moment of forgetfulness, our two bodies, hers and mine, would blur in your physical memory and you would use that special name for me – but I also longed for that moment, because I would then know for certain that I had taken you from her.”
― Magda Szabó, The Fawn

“I am constantly observing things, places, objects, people – I do it all the time without realising.”
― Magda Szabó, The Fawn

“I wasn't interested in what happened afterwards, it was the acting I loved.”
― Magda Szabó, The Fawn

“You mustn't be upset, he was a long way away from my thoughts; but I'm sorry. I didn't mean to talk about him.”
― Magda Szabó, The Fawn

“I rearranged my face to look alluring while at the same time radiating innocence, and brightened my face and flashed my teeth to look like a good fairy.”
― Magda Szabó, The Fawn

“She caught a rash from some strawberries once and she kept staring at herself in a hand mirror and crying. She certainly knew she was beautiful; she took a timid, innocent pleasure in the fact.”
― Magda Szabó, The Fawn

“I didn't know whether I loved you or not and I didn't know if you still loved me the way you used to, when you used to look at me the way my father did at my mother all those years ago – it was all so overwhelming and so confusing that I started to tug at the ring and squeeze it and twist it about, sobbing and whimpering.”
― Magda Szabó, The Fawn

“I didn't know what stage fright was, and I never forgot a word: prose, verse or song, it was all fixed in my brain instantly, I never had to learn anything twice, including what I had to do with my hands or my feet; if the role was a solemn one, I howled like a thunderstorm, and if it was a merry one I laughed so much and kept on laughing until the audience split their sides. I also declaimed patriotic and religious verses, though they weren't part of my usual repertoire; I was always chosen for roles that didn't require costumes, or ones that could easily be run up. I would be a peasant, or an old woman, or a servant – but it was all the same to me what I played, male or female, young or old; I preferred to be anything other than what I was in real life, and I enjoyed it all the more for that.”
― Magda Szabó, The Fawn

“I dreamed about the fawn night after night. You don't know what it's like when a person longs so unspeakably for something. I was still angry and bitterly ashamed – of the shoes, of the clothes I wore, and the food we ate. I loved oranges, but I would rather have choked than accept a single segment of one from Angéla. I wasn't interested in their house, the illustrations of fairy tales in her room, or the contents of her little bookshelf: only the fawn. In those days I often fell asleep crying about it.”
― Magda Szabó, The Fawn

“I often used to think that if any real trouble came into her life, something that really dented her confidence or frightened her, she would have only to go and look in the mirror and her courage would return.”
― Magda Szabó, The Fawn

“For me at that age, a married couple should be inseparable, even if they were not as close as my mother and father. I knew, from books, that people had lovers, but I had no idea that you could have one living in the same house, that the spouse might be aware of it and accept the fact, and that everything would carry on as normal; people would continue to visit, you could raise two children, and behave as if no-one had noticed. To me it seemed both bizarre and unimaginable. The idea occupied my mind the rest of the evening.”
― Magda Szabó, The Fawn

“I would have loved it if you could have known everything about me without my having to say anything, yet at the same time, creaking rustily somewhere down inside me, the words had already taken shape – about the Barrage, and Father, Ambrus and Auntie Irma's shoes, and everything... and I was afraid that I would start crying, though there was no reason t cry because I was at last happy, as happy as I had ever been in my life.”
― Magda Szabó, The Fawn

“I have no idea what I was crying about, I don't think it was about you, or because it had been so dark in the chapel – I don't know when I was last inside one. The red glow of the light in the sanctuary, the great floppy yellow roses on the altar to Mary – it was absolutely wonderful to be in there, unspeakably good. If I believed in God – if I believed in anything at all – it wouldn't have been the same. I would have instantly leaped up and started pleading with the Heavens, I would have whined and whimpered and lamented and begged and pleaded and promised to do anything in return, and wept uncontrollably; but I knew there was no help to be had, and I didn't want any anyway, so there was no point in asking: even if I could have brought myself to beg for it, it would still have been no good, I could never have undertaken to be a good girl and never to tell lies, I would simply have offloaded all my burdens onto Heaven, gone away with a shining face full of tears, and it would have cost me nothing; I would have been able to let myself go for a moment – and everything would have been even harder than before. So I really can't explain why it was so unbelievably good just to be in there.”
― Magda Szabó, The Fawn