Losing North Quotes

“The problem, of course, is that languages are not only languages. They're also worldviews -- and therefore, to some extent, untranslatable ...”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“The truth is that all of us have multiple identities -- if only because all of us were children once, then teenagers, and are these things no longer, yet are them still.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“All sorts of behaviour can be inspired by self-hatred. You can become an artist. Commit suicide. Adopt a new name, a new country, a new language.
All of the above (Romain Gary).”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“Literature allows us to cross the borders -- as imaginary as they are indispensable -- which circumscribe and define our selves. Reading, we allow other people to enter us -- and if we make room for them so willingly, it's because we know them already. The novel celebrates our miraculous capacity to recognize others in ourselves, and ourselves in others.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“At twenty, with a modicum of discipline and luck, you can invent your own appearance. You're smooth and svelte, silky and shimmery, you make original choices in clothing and hairstyles... 'I'm my own woman now,' you think; 'I don't owe anything to anyone!”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“For decades now, I've been dreaming, thinking, making love, writing, fantasizing and weeping in French, in English, and sometimes in a monstrous mixture of the two. For all that, the two languages are neither superimposed nor interchangeable in my mind. Like most false bilinguals, I often have the feeling that they 'sleep apart' in my brain. Far from being comfortably settled in face to face or back to back or side by side, they are distinct and hierarchized: first English then French in my life, first French then English in my writing. The words say it well: your native or 'mother' tongue, the one you acquired in earliest childhood, enfolds and envelops you so that you belong to it, whereas with the 'adopted' tongue, it's the other ay around -- you're the one who needs to mother it, master it, and make it belong to you.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“The Buddhists are right -- and so is Kundera -- this lightness of being is perfectly unbearable. Who can accept the idea of having only one life?”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“Literature allows us to cross the borders -- as imaginary as they are indispensable -- which circumscribe and define our selves. Reading, we allow other people to enter us -- and if we make room for them so willingly, it's because we know them already. The novel celebrates our miraculous capacity to recognize others in ourselves, and ourselves in others. Of all the literary genres, the novel is the genre humain.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“No, I stayed home. And yet, in one way or another -- by way of telephone conversations, letters, photographs, or simply memories -- all of these worlds were part of my day today.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“Yet the explanation was simple. These memories had died of inanition. You've got the pay visits to your memories from time to time. You've got to feed them, take them out and air them, show them around, tell them to other people or to yourself. If you don't, they waste away.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“All pain is translatable, from the toothache of a dental assistant in Idaho to natural catastrophes like the floods in China.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“Merely knowing a word, moreover, doesn't necessarily make you capable of using it.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“Do I am, then, to strip away all the stylistic accoutrements of French and achieve a sort of 'degree zero,' to borrow the famous expression coined by Roland Barthes? I don't think so... I did study under Barthes's ægis for a couple of years, however, and he definitely contributed to my extreme (not to say hyper) sensitivity to language; he taught me to be wary of (not to say allergic to) 'readymade' expressions, and it is to him that I owe my penchant for parentheses, colons, semicolons, ellipses... and overlong sentences; I both appreciate and resent this influence.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“Style, someone once said, is a marriage of love between an individual and his or her language.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“Decidedly, the more I think about these things, the more at sea I feel.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“...So where's the real you? Huh? Let's say you decide to rip away the mask -- what kind of face will be revealed? The problem is that when a human face has spent a number of years beneath a mask, deprived of light and oxygen, it changes. Not only does it age, as all faces do, but it tends to get a bit pallid, flaccid, puffy...”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“When you think about it, there's a whole novel behind the voice of a Haitian in Montreal, a German in Paris, a Laotian in Chicago...”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“Women are born actresses. They know all about adaptation; it's part of their identity as women.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“Yes. That's the way it is. No one's amazed by what you've been up to. For all these years, you've been performing those exhausting acrobatics not to a distant gallery, but to an empty house.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“Your childhood stays with you all your life, no matter where you go.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“All sorts of behaviour can be inspired by self-hatred. You can become an artist. Commit suicide. Adopt a new name, a new country, a new language. All of the above.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“Who am I, in French? I really don't know -- a bit of everything, perhaps.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“A person who decides, voluntarily, as an adult, unconstrained by outside circumstances, to leave her native land and adopt a hitherto unfamiliar language and culture, has to face the fact that for the rest of her life she will be involved in theatre, imitation, make-believe.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“People in exile are rich -- rich with the accumulated sum of their contradictory identities.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile

“You've got to pay visits to your memories from time to time. You've got to feed them, take them out and air them, show them around, tell them to other people or to yourself. If you don't, they waste away.”
― Nancy Huston, Losing North: Essays on Cultural Exile