A Girl's Story Quotes

“I started to make a literary being of myself, someone who lives as if her experiences were to be written down someday.”
― Annie Ernaux, Mémoire de fille

“D'avoir reçu les clés pour comprendre la honte ne donne pas le pouvoir de l'effacer.”
― Annie Ernaux, Mémoire de fille

“Chaque jour et partout dans le monde il y a des hommes en cercle autour d’une femme, prêts à lui jeter la pierre.”
― Annie Ernaux, Mémoire de fille

“The girl in the picture is not me, but neither is she a fictional creation. There is no one else in the world I know in such vast and inexhaustible detail,”
― Annie Ernaux, A girl's story

“How are we present in the existences of others, their memories, their ways of being, even their acts? There is a staggering imbalance between the influence those two nights with that man have had upon my life, and the nothingness of my presence in his. I do not envy him: I’m the one who is writing.”
― Annie Ernaux, A girl's story

“The girl in the picture is a stranger who imparted her memory to me.”
― Annie Ernaux, A Girl's Story

“One cannot see the future of something learned.”
― Annie Ernaux, A Girl's Story

“She has no defined self, but “selves” who pass from one book to another.”
― Annie Ernaux, A girl's story

“Each one of my desires has enriched me more than the always-deceitful possession of the object of my desire.”
― Annie Ernaux, A girl's story

“There will inevitably be a last book, as there is always a last lover, a last spring, but no sign by which to know them.”
― Annie Ernaux, A Girl's Story

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of in loving a person and saying so.”
― Annie Ernaux, A girl's story

“أخذت أحول نفسي إلى كائن أدبي..كائن يعيش الوقائع كأنها ستتحول إلى كتابة يوما ما”
― آني إرنو, Mémoire de fille

“Déjà le souvenir de ce que j'ai écrit s'efface. Je ne sais pas ce qu'est ce texte. Même ce que je poursuivais en écrivant le livre s'est dissous. J'ai retrouvé dans mes papiers une sorte de note d'intention :
Explorer le gouffre entre l'effarante réalité de ce qui arrive, au moment où ça arrive et l'étrange irréalité que revêt, des années après, ce qui est arrivé.”
― Annie Ernaux, Mémoire de fille

“Et rien ne peut faire que ce qui a été vécu dans un monde, celui d'avant 1968, et condamné par les règles de ce monde, puisse changer radicalement de sens dans un autre monde. Cela reste un événement sexuel singulier, dont la honte est insoluble dans la doxa du nouveau siècle.”
― Annie Ernaux, Mémoire de fille

“I am endowed by shame’s vast memory, more detailed and implacable than any other, a gift unique to shame.”
― Annie Ernaux, A Girl's Story

“The only thing that matters to me is to seize life and time, understand, and take pleasure.”
― Annie Ernaux, A Girl's Story

“(Here, I note the first manifestation of a desire for inaccessibility, which, throughout my love life, has always arrived too late.)”
― Annie Ernaux, A girl's story

“But what is the point of writing if not to unearth things, or even just one thing that cannot be reduced to any kind of psychological or sociological explanation and is not the result of a preconceived idea or demonstration but a narrative: something that emerges from the creases when a story is unfolded, and can help us understand—endure—events that occur and the things that we do?”
― Annie Ernaux, A girl's story

“People in this world, she imagines, talk endlessly about poetry and literature, the meaning of life and freedom, as in The Age of Reason, Sartre’s novel that she inhabited for all of July, transformed into the character of Ivich. She has no defined self, but “selves” who pass from one book to another.”
― Annie Ernaux, A girl's story

“The thought of “just enjoying life” is unbearable. Every moment lived without a writing project resembles the last.”
― Annie Ernaux, A girl's story

“I know it sounds absurd Please tell me who I am. —Supertramp “One thing more,” she said. “I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in loving a person and saying so.” It was not true. The shame of her surrender, her letter, her unrequited love would go on gnawing, burning, till the end of her life. [. . .] After all, it did not seem to hurt much: certainly not more than could be borne in secret, without a sign. It had all been experience, and that was a salutary thing. You might write a book now, and make him one of the characters; or take up music seriously; or kill yourself. —Rosamond Lehmann, from Dusty Answer”
― Annie Ernaux, A girl's story

“At this very moment, out in the streets, the open spaces, on the metro, in lecture halls, and inside millions of heads, millions of novels are being written chapter by chapter, erased and revised, and all of them die and a result of becoming, or not becoming reality.”
― Annie Ernaux, A Girl's Story

“The most intense part of her life is the time she spends immersed in the books she has insatiably consumed ever since she learned to read.”
― Annie Ernaux, A girl's story

“Un été immense comme ils le sont tous jusqu'à vingt-cinq ans”
― Annie Ernaux, A Girl's Story

“Pero para qué escribir si no es para desenterrar cosas, hasta una sola, irreductible a explicaciones de toda suerte, psicológicas, sociológicas, algo que no sea el resultado de una idea preconcebida ni de una demostración, sino del relato, algo que salga de los repliegues escalonados del relato y que pueda ayudar a entender —a soportar— lo que sucede y lo que se hace.”
― Annie Ernaux, Mémoire de fille

“Qué hacer de esta verdad: que soy nula, que no doy la talla en la vía en la que me he iniciado”
― Annie Ernaux, Mémoire de fille

“Ni soumission ni consentement, seulement l'effarement du reel qui fait tout juste se dire "qu'est-ce qui m'arrive" ou "c'est a moi que ça arrive" sauf qu'il ny'a plus de moi en cette circonstance, ou ce n'est plus le meme deja.”
― Annie Ernaux, Mémoire de fille

“What others believe about us is nothing compared to that which they do not know,”
― Annie Ernaux, A Girl's Story

“I truly became the girl of S. But it is not she who suddenly revives but the reality of her dream, the powerful reality of her dream, spread throughout the universe by the words sung by Dalida and Darío Moreno, and covered up again, buried by the shame of having had that dream.”
― Annie Ernaux, A Girl's Story

“a cross between Les Sablonnières in Le Grand Meaulnes and the palace in Last Year at Marienbad.”
― Annie Ernaux, A girl's story