Histoire de la violence Quotes

“The things we remember most clearly are always those that bring us shame.”
― Édouard Louis, Histoire de la violence

“I’ve been trying to construct a memory that would let me undo the past, that would amplify it and destroy it, so that the more I remember and the more I lose myself in the images that remain, the less they have to do with me.”
― Édouard Louis, Histoire de la violence

“I’m sorry, monsieur, but now this is a criminal proceeding. It’s out of your hands.” That night I didn’t understand how my story could stop belonging to me”
― Édouard Louis, Histoire de la violence

“People always think their own lives are so fascinating, and yes they realize everyone else thinks the same, but still they tell themselves that everyone else is wrong and they’re right.”
― Édouard Louis, Histoire de la violence

“je cherche à construire une mémoire qui me permettrait de défaire le passé, qui d'un geste l'amplifierait et le détruirait, par laquelle plus je me souviens et plus je me dissous dans les images qu'il me reste, moins j'en suis le centre”
― Édouard Louis, Histoire de la violence

“I was sure that if I kept acting like a trauma victim, that’s what I’d become the effects would be even worse and would last longer. Meanwhile my body knew exactly what was going on. I told Clara: there’s no way to ignore the blood, there’s no way to ignore the fear of being in my apartment. I can’t ignore the fatigue that is a side effect of my medication, or the marks on my body, or the way my heart races when I’m walking down the street at night by myself and someone, a man, walks up behind me and I’m scared by the sound of his footsteps. But I knew I had to lie to myself. I don’t mean that lying was a solution, and I don’t know whether this would work for anyone else, but what I needed was to pretend with all my might that I wasn’t traumatized, to tell myself I was all right, even if that was a lie.”
― Édouard Louis, Histoire de la violence

“As I’ve gotten older I’ve seen guys that, if you get them off on their own, they can be nice enough, but I don’t care—as soon as you get a few of them together, that’s it. Men turn into idiots when there’s a few of them around. You don’t even recognize them anymore.”
― Édouard Louis, Histoire de la violence

“I know from experience that the isolation of those who try to forget the past is as terrible as the isolation of those for whom the past is an obsession; I’ve learned that the question is never whether or not to forget, that this is a false dichotomy; the only question, as I told Clara later—this week actually, almost a year later—the only question is how to remember the past without repeating it.”
― Édouard Louis, Histoire de la violence

“writing about life amounts to thinking about life, and thinking about life amounts to casting doubt on life, but only one who is suffocated by his very lifeblood, or in whom it somehow circulates unnaturally, casts doubt on that lifeblood.”
― Édouard Louis, History of Violence

“It turned out that it is impossible to write about happiness, or at least I can’t, which in this case amounts to the same thing after all; happiness is perhaps too simple to let itself be written about, I wrote, as I am reading right now on a slip of paper that I wrote then and from which I am writing it down here; a life lived in happiness is therefore a life lived in muteness, I wrote. It turned out that writing about life amounts to thinking about life, and thinking about life amounts to casting doubt on life, but only one who is suffocated by his very lifeblood, or in whom it somehow circulates unnaturally, casts doubt on that lifeblood. It turned out that I don’t write in order to seek pleasure; on the contrary, it turned out that by writing I am seeking pain, the most acute possible, well-nigh intolerable pain, most likely because pain is truth, and as to what constitutes truth, I wrote, the answer is so simple: truth is what consumes you, I wrote. Imre Kert ész, Kaddish for an Unborn Child”
― Édouard Louis, Histoire de la violence

“Non, c'est le contraire, c'est le contraire qui devrait arriver, tu devrais avoir le droit au silence, ceux qui ont vécu la violence devraient avoir le droit de ne pas en parler, ils devraient être les seuls à avoir le droit de se taire, et ce sont les autres à qui on devrait reprocher de ne pas parler.”
― Édouard Louis, Histoire de la violence

“Le bruit est partout, à toutes les heures du jour et de la nuit, presque autonome par rapport aux personnes qui sont censées le produire, le bruit pénètre les corps par le conduit auditif et se répercute dans chaque parcelle de l'organisme, le bruit harcèle le silence des organes.”
― Édouard Louis, Histoire de la violence

“(...)Ik word verscheurd tussen de schaamte dat ik net zo ben als iedereen en de opluchting dat ik niet abnormaal ben.”
― Édouard Louis, Histoire de la violence

“(...)je zou haast denken dat wat schaamte wordt genoemd in feite de sterkste, duurzaamste vorm van onthouden is, een hogere vorm ervan, een herinnering die zich diep in het vlees grift, je zou haast denken, zoals Didier beweert, dat de levendigste herinneringen van een leven altijd die van de schaamte zijn.”
― Édouard Louis, Histoire de la violence

“And yet the doctor had warned him: under no circumstances should he take his medicine on an empty stomach, not unless he had breakfast right after. And in fact, very often, when he took his pills on an empty stomach, the first thing he did was limp to the toilet so he could throw up, holding his hands out before him like a bad actor imitating a blind man, still between sleep and waking, eyes squinted shut, mouth gummy from sleep. The acid odor of the vomit would wake him. He hoped this didn’t interfere with the treatment, he hoped the pills had had time to dissolve in his stomach and spread through his tissues and bloodstream between the time he’d swallowed them and the moment when he found himself on his knees against the toilet, leaning over the bowl, hands firmly planted on the plastic seat—because he was afraid of drowning in the toilet bowl, drowning in the water and the rejected contents of his stomach, and his body would be racked with spasms, and there would be nothing left to throw up since he hadn’t eaten, and his body would contract, arch, and twist the way you wring out a damp rag to squeeze out the last drops of water. Even if he didn’t throw up, the nausea would persist from morning to night. Often he took a nap in the afternoon. He’d get up at noon, wander around the apartment, then go back to bed at two, get up at six, and nervously wait for dark so he could go back to bed again. He had to follow the course of treatment, his body didn’t tolerate it well, and since it began his nights had stretched from eight hours to fifteen or sixteen hours per day, and the whole time he kept thinking, After all you’ve been through.”
― Édouard Louis, Histoire de la violence