Suspended Sentences Quotes

“He was seeking a lost innocence and settings made for enjoyment and ease, but where one could never be happy again.”
― Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas

“On the sidewalk, dead leaves. Or burned pages from an old Gaffiot dictionary. It’s the neighborhood of colleges and convents.”
― Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas

“Without fully realizing it, I began writing my first book. It was neither a vocation nor a particular gift that pushed me to write, but quite simply the enigma posed by a man I had no chance of finding again, and by all those questions that would never have an answer.”
― Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas

“He no longer knew which man he was. He told me that after a certain number of years, we accept a truth that we've intuited but kept hidden from ourselves, out of carelessness or cowardice: a brother, a double died in our stead on an unknown date and in an unknown place, and his shadow ends up merging with us.”
― Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas

“Don't let it faze you, kid. I've fallen into my share of black holes, too...”
― Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas

“Of all the punctuation marks, he told me, ellipses were his favorite.”
― Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas

“Little by little, that man melted into the wall. Or else the rain, from falling on him so heavily, had dissolved him, the way water dilutes a fresco that hasn't had time to dry properly. As hard as I pressed my forehead against the glass and peered at the dark gray wall, no trace of him remained. He had vanished in that sudden way that I'd later notice in other people, like my father, which leaves you so puzzled that you have no choice but to look for proofs and clues to convince yourself these people had really existed.”
― Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas

“The Champs-Elysées...It's like that pond a British novelist talks about, at the bottom of which, in layered deposits, lie the echoes of the voices of every passerby who has daydreamed on its banks.The shimmering water preserves those echoes forever and, on quiet evenings, they all blend together...”
― Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas

“Farther up, in the recess formed by the palace wing, was a clock. And behind that clock, the cell of the Prisoner of Zenda. No stroller in the Carrousel gardens ventured down that alley. We spent entire afternoons playing amid the broken birdbaths and statues, the stones and dead leaves. The hands of the clock never moved. They forever struck five-thirty. Those immobile hands enveloped us in a deep, soothing silence. We only had to stay in the alley and nothing would ever change.”
― Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas

“The man was as slippery and elusive as his gaze.”
― Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas

“He gazed at us one after the other, as if to reassure himself that there was no danger in sharing a confidence.”
― Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas

“Some sentences remain etched in your mind forever.”
― Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas

“He thought a photographer was nothing, that he should blend into the surroundings and become invisible, the better to work and capture—as he said—natural light. One shouldn't even hear the click of the Rolleiflex.”
― Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas

“I was amazed that the roar of traffic had stopped farther over toward Denfert-Rochereau, as if the feeling of absence and emptiness that Jansen left was spreading in concentric circles and Paris was gradually clearing out.”
― Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas

“One day, when I'd expressed surprise at that feigned carelessness, he'd told me you had to 'approach things gently and quietly or they pull away,”
― Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas

“There, onscreen, he was crossing a hotel corridor, and I thought it really strange that one could pass from a world in which everything ended to another, freed from the laws of gravity, in which you were suspended for all eternity: from that evening on Rue Froidevaux, of which nothing remained except the fading echoes in my memory, to those several seconds captured on film, in which Deckers would cross a hotel corridor until the end of time.”
― Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas

“He had us sit on a bench, then he posed us in front of a wall shaded by a row of trees, on Avenue Denfert-Rochereau. I've kept one of those shots. My girlfriend and I are sitting on the bench. To me it's as if they were other people, not us, because of the years that have passed, or maybe because of what Jansen saw through his lens, which we wouldn't have seen in a mirror at the time: two anonymous teenagers lost in Paris.”
― Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas

“When daylight lasts until 10pm because of the time change, and the traffic noise has died down, I have the illusion that all I’d need to do is return to those faraway neighborhoods to find the people I’ve lost, who had never left [...] Colette is leaning against the door of a private townhouse, hands in the pockets of her raincoat. Every time I look at that picture, it hurts. It’s like in the morning when you try to recall your dream from the night before, but all that’s left are scraps that dissolve before you can put them together. I knew that woman in another life and I’m doing my best to remember. Maybe someday I’ll manage to break through that layer of silence and amnesia.”
― Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas

“We’d known each other over a very short period of time. He left France in June of 1964, and I’m writing this in April 1992. I never received word from him and I don’t know if he’s dead or alive. The memory of him had remained dormant, but now it has suddenly come flooding back this early spring of 1992. Is it because I came across the picture of my girlfriend and me, on the back of which a blue stamp says Photo by Jansen. All rights reserved? Or for the simple reason that every spring looks the same? Today the air was light, the buds had burst on the trees in the gardens of the Observatoire, and the month of April 1992 merged by an effect of superimposition with the month of April 1964.”
― Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas

“rediscover the quality he possessed in”
― Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas