That Mad Ache Quotes

“Nothing brings on jealousy like laughter.”
― Françoise Sagan, That Mad Ache

“He knew this euphoria of hers: it was the euphoria of being alone.”
― Françoise Sagan, That Mad Ache: A Novel

“There are certain moments of perfect happiness — often moments of utter solitude — which, when recalled in life’s bitterer periods, can save one from despair, even more so than the memory of times spent with friends, for one knows that one was happy all alone, for no clear reason.”
― Françoise Sagan, That Mad Ache: A Novel

“Ever since, I’ve been looking everywhere for parents, in my lovers, in my friends, and it’s all right with me to have nothing of my own — not any plans and not any worries. I like this kind of life, it’s terrible but true. I don’t know why it is, but the moment I wake up something in me feels things are going right.”
― Françoise Sagan, That Mad Ache: A Novel

“When I was a child”? Only the nostalgia for those days of utter, absolute irresponsibility, now long gone. But for her (and this she would never have admitted to anyone), those days weren’t gone at all. She still felt totally irresponsible.”
― Françoise Sagan, That Mad Ache: A Novel

“You know, people always seem overwhelmed by their lives, while You, somehow You’ve turned the tables on life, and it’s You who seem to be on top. Voilà. I don’t know else how to put it. Would You like a lemon sherbet?”
― Françoise Sagan, That Mad Ache: A Novel

“Life was becoming for Lucile what it was for her Métro-riding companions, and what writers so often depicted it as being: a world in which irresponsibility does not”
― Françoise Sagan, That Mad Ache: A Novel

“Her utter lack of self-importance made her passionate. In a word, she was happy.”
― Françoise Sagan, That Mad Ache: A Novel

“The number of times she’d said “wait and see” to herself in her thirty years of existence was way beyond counting.”
― Françoise Sagan, That Mad Ache: A Novel

“She wasn’t a courtesan, nor an intellectual, nor the mother of a family — she was nothing at all. And”
― Françoise Sagan, That Mad Ache: A Novel

“As for Lucile, her first awareness of the world each morning was the sensation of being made love to, and she would find herself drifting into consciousness with a mixture of surprise, pleasure, and a vague anger at this half-rape, which deprived her of all of her traditional rituals of waking up — opening her eyes, closing them again, rejecting the new day or else welcoming it — all the confused and deliciously private little conflicts in her”
― Françoise Sagan, That Mad Ache: A Novel

“What he does not yet understand is that whatever makes a woman strong is the reason that certain men will love her, even if behind her strengths there hide great weaknesses. This he will learn from You. He will learn that You are bubbly, funny, and sweet only because You have all Your weaknesses. But by then it will be too late.”
― Françoise Sagan, That Mad Ache: A Novel

“Then we’ll take the train to Paris tonight. There is a night train, isn’t there? We’ll catch it at Cannes.”
― Françoise Sagan, That Mad Ache: A Novel

“thirty-year-old children who refused to act like grown-ups.”
― Françoise Sagan, That Mad Ache: A Novel

“Il y a des moments de bonheur parfait, quelquefois dans la solitude dont le souvenir, plus que celui de n’importe qui d’extérieur, peut, en cas de crise, vous sauver du désespoir. Car on sait qu’on a été heureux seul et sans raison. On sait que c’est possible. Et le bonheur – qui vous semble si lié à quelqu’un lorsqu’on est malheureux par lui, si irrévocablement, organiquement presque, dépendant de lui – vous réapparaît comme une chose lisse, ronde, intacte et à jamais libre, à votre merci (lointaine, bien sûr, mais forcément possible). Et ce souvenir est plus réconfortant que celui d’un bonheur partagé avant, avec quelqu’un d’autre, car ce quelqu’un d’autre, ne l’aimant plus, vous apparaît comme une erreur et ce souvenir heureux basé sur rien.”
― Françoise Sagan, LA Chamade