Toutes les femmes sont fatales Quotes

“We want to choose one but to be chosen by all.”
― Claude Mauriac, All Women are Fatal

“At love's most intoxicating moment, I have enough freedom left to want to abandon it, for a moment, to other hands.”
― Claude Mauriac, All Women are Fatal

“Death is only beginning to frighten me again. I had stopped being afraid of it after the revelation of that pale, pure morning when I understood that I was no different from other men. Scarcely more intelligent than the most stupid.”
― Claude Mauriac, All Women are Fatal

“I was born too soon into a world too young.”
― Claude Mauriac, All Women are Fatal

“Twenty times a day, twenty different beings demand and receive from us the gift of what is best within us: our whole life offered forever in a moment. Perhaps these miracles demand darkness and silence? Then it will not be a novelist but a poet who will come to reveal them to us in whispers. And we'll pretend to not have understood in order to continue to be able to understand.”
― Claude Mauriac, All Women are Fatal

“Death, before erasing me from the world, erases my desire to know the world. What's the good of seeing if you can't see everything, or see forever.”
― Claude Mauriac, All Women are Fatal

“But I'm exhausted, finally, by this mob within me that keeps me from being myself. I suppose one feels the need to be alone in order to grow old and die.”
― Claude Mauriac, All Women are Fatal

“Where? On the impalpable and the invisible. Nowhere. Not even necessarily in the place where my mistress happens to be, since I sometimes love her better absent than present.”
― Claude Mauriac, All Women are Fatal

“All women are fatal. But maybe all men are fatal too, to almost all women? I say maybe, and I say almost. What do we know about the other sex?”
― Claude Mauriac, All Women are Fatal

“Again, now, the dizziness and the collapse. Coexistence of these clear ideas and of this obsessive mystery. Day. Night. Day. Night. Too much light. Too much darkness. Much too much darkness. Words organized into arguments are rigorously articulated as if I were trying to convince, to seduce. Since the most shapeless cry can't express so much confused and profound anxiety, I must, once again, silently scream my fear. Logic. Panic. Day. Night. Absent, I count the blows in this life and death struggle. Who am I? Neither so rational as this determined pedant. Nor so mad as this paranoiac of the shadows. Indifferent to the pleasure of understanding as to the anxiety of being. Out of reach. And yet, at this moment, terrified, terrorized, prostrated. Returning abruptly to the reality of this unknown city. And resuming my learned interior monologue where I had left off.”
― Claude Mauriac, All Women are Fatal

“I'm too lonely. Pull in this belly that I never used to think about and that now I can't forget. One of the tangible signs of a revolting maturity. The intoxication of forty is unimaginable to someone who hasn't reached this age. Up till then, the years roll by without leaving any sign except their too-certain but imponderable accumulation. Abstract vertigo. The idea but not the suffering of growing old. Knowledge without consciousness. And then a heaviness materializes, something we call the weight of years, without knowing what we're saying. Sickness and death cease being a virtual danger by which only others are threatened, or that other person who is ourself. Another self of mine that I see from outside, in the shelter of my youth, while it leans over the transom and watches Paris slowly emerging from the night in the happy summer dawn. Easy serenity. Faked revelation. Life begins at forty. End of youth. We all have the absurd certainty of escaping the common fate. Happy aberration to which I owe an excessive youth. So long that finally I got used to it. It's at fifteen that you suffer over growing old. Every protest's futile. Yet I refuse to consent. I reject decrepitude. Let the others submit.”
― Claude Mauriac, All Women are Fatal

“A last trumpet solo breaks out. Last for me, I'm leaving before my capacity for feeling gets blunted. Detached, the instrument's muffled plaint expresses without discretion the pathetic and absurd secret of the living. Again, that impression of a will substituted for my own. I'm not the one who's decided to leave. My body has stood up, walked, gone through the door the way it might have slipped or fallen if the imbalance that's just urged it outside had been more brutal. An imperceptible change in the internal economy, a lassitude of the mind or the muscles, and the automaton begins moving.”
― Claude Mauriac, All Women are Fatal

“Here, where several years of homogeneous memories are offered to her eyes, my memory revives, depending on where I walk, twenty years of an adult existence in which such various periods have followed each other that I have difficulty making them mine. How could I have been so poor at one period and at another so rich? How so much alone, then so happy, then abandoned again? At every intersection of the city, at the corner of the least-frequented streets, on the facades of many houses, wretched or luxurious, fragments of my past have remained, clinging, stuck. Fewer memories of love than one might think. Banal bits of conversations, meaningless gestures, wrecks all the more moving in that I cannot attach them to anything important in my life.”
― Claude Mauriac, All Women are Fatal

“Happiness, of all myths the least likely.”
― Claude Mauriac, All Women are Fatal

“First signs of the age when wisdom begins? There are moments when my past makes me ashamed. When I'm embarrassed to have taken so much while giving so little.”
― Claude Mauriac, All Women are Fatal

“From top to bottom, from left to right, my glance has made a cross on that other woman, has crossed her off the face of the earth.”
― Claude Mauriac, All Women are Fatal

“Never to burn for anyone, in the most ordinary as well as the most physical sense, is ultimately a form of anguish. Sometimes a brief moment with a person, man or woman, whom I feel close to permits me to measure my habitual aridity. True tenderness, even if I devote it, for a second pity or remorse, to some flouted innocent. Love a way of escaping my solitude. The easiest love already too difficult for me. I'm not even worthy of a simple, beautiful human love. No, I don't burn, I'll never burn, despite my regret over Marie-Prune. That's my own torment, my virtual passion: as if finding oneself beyond pain, on the other side of its frontier, were a way of suffering all the same.”
― Claude Mauriac, All Women are Fatal

“There are no reasons why the past should have disappeared. Nothing distinguishes it from the present, except for this detail: the company of one woman and not that of another. But they might have been contemporary or changed places in my life, one on the threshold of my youth, the other on the eve of its termination. Life was the same, fifteen, ten years ago. On this beach that has always been the same, and from year to year that seems to have been the same everywhere, the warm air had the same salubrious smell. Only I've been less and less young. I've gradually aged in a universe forever young. But I still feel as new as the world, I too am unchanging, incorruptible, renewed by each morning. In seven years, I'll be forty. Forty! Seven years ago, I was twenty-six. How is it possible to be twenty-six already, to be so old already, not to be young any more!”
― Claude Mauriac, All Women are Fatal

“There are no reasons why the past should have disappeared. Nothing distinguishes it from the present, except for this detail: the company of one woman and not that of another. But they might have been contemporary or changed places in my life, one on the threshold of my youth, the other on the eve of its termination. Life was the same, fifteen, ten years ago. On this beach that has alawys been the same, and from year to year that seems to have been the same everywhere, th warm air had the same salubrious smell. Only I've been less and less young. I've gradually aged in a universe forever young. But I still feel as new as the world, I too am unchanging, incorruptible, renewed by each morning. In seven years, I'll be forty. Forty! Seven years ago, I was twenty-six. How is it possible to be twenty-six already, to be so old already, not to be young any more!”
― Claude Mauriac, All Women are Fatal

“His sad expression, now, that isolates Irene and me, destroying the universe around us. It's his turn to envy me, twenty years after those days when the beauty, elegance and notoriety of his mistresses gave him, in my eyes, a painful prestige. The apparent modesty of my triumph doesn't at all diminish its cruelty. I feel almost happy over the sufferings of this man. His solitude wins me from my own.”
― Claude Mauriac, All Women are Fatal

“Nothing that is mine seems to me to deserve my pride: in the seventh grade, I couldn't admire the eighth-grades enough, though the eighth grade seemed to me quite devoid of charm once I was in it. And so on until the day I found myself with a doctorate in something and decorated, and had only scorn for such mediocre privileges. Life grows disenchanting as our dreams are fulfilled.”
― Claude Mauriac, All Women are Fatal

“The secret of old age is that it has no other reality than its appearance. A drama and mystery that already, I know, belong to maturity. To grow old isn't to change: only the physique alters, but we remain the same. I see no difference, except perhaps in an increased lucidity and knowledge, between what I was fifteen years ago and what I am today. To grow old is gradually to discover the anguish of our condition. I've always been an anxious man, but it used to be only over certain inner monsters. Henceforth, death is within myself. There's not a day when I don't listen to a body in which I've lost confidence, only because I know how old I am and what threatens me henceforth.”
― Claude Mauriac, All Women are Fatal

“Don't yield to confidences. My misfortunes are none of her business.”
― Claude Mauriac, All Women are Fatal