Letter to D Quotes

“You're 82 years old. You've shrunk six centimetres, you only weigh 45 kilos yet you're still beautiful, graceful and desirable. We've lived together now for 58 years and I love you more than ever. I once more feel a gnawing emptiness in the hollow of my chest that is only filled when your body is pressed next to mine.”
― André Gorz, Letter to D: A Love Story

“With you I understood that pleasure is not something you give or take. It's a way of giving yourself and calling forth the gift of self from another person.”
― André Gorz, Letter to D: A Love Story

“What captivated me about you was that you opened the door to another world for me. The values that dominated my childhood had no place there. That world enchanted me. I could leave the real world behind and be someone else, without any ties or obligations. With you, I was elsewhere, in a foreign place, foreign to myself. You gave me access to another dimension when I'd always rejected any fixed identity and just worn different identities on top of each other, though none of them were mine.

By speaking to you in English, I made your language mine. I've continued to talk to you in English right up to this day, even when you answered me in French. For me, English, which I knew mainly through you and through books, was from the start like a private language that preserved our intimacy against the intrusion of the real world, and its prevailing social normals. I felt like I was building a protected and protective world with you.”
― André Gorz, Letter to D: A Love Story

“At night I sometimes see the figure of a man, on an empty road in a deserted landscape, walking behind a hearse. I am that man. It's you the hearse is taking away. I don't want to be there for your cremation; I don't want to be given an urn with your ashes in it. I hear the voice of Kathleen Ferrier singing, 'Die Welt ist leer, Ich will nicht leben mehr'* and I wake up. I check your breathing, my hand brushed over you. Neither of us wants to outlive the other. We've often said to ourselves that if, by some miracle, we were to have a second life, we'd like to spend it together."

*The world is empty. I don't want to go on living.”
― André Gorz, Letter to D: A Love Story

“I'd reached the age where you ask yourself what you've done with your life, what you would have liked to have done with it. I had the impression of not having lived my life, of having always observed it at a distance, of having developed only one side of myself and being poor as a person. You were, and always had been, richer than I was. You'd blossomed and grown in every dimension. You were at one with your life; whereas I'd always been in a hurry to move on to the next task, as though our life would only really begin later.”
― André Gorz, Letter to D: A Love Story

“You had no place of your own in the world of adults. It was sink or swim for you - you couldn't help but be strong because your whole world was precarious. I've always felt your underlying fragility. I loved your fragility when you weren't afraid to let it show.”
― André Gorz, Letter to D: A Love Story

“J'ai compris avec toi que le plaisir n'est pas quelque chose qu'on prend ou qu'on donne. Il est manière de se donner et d'appeler le don de soi de l'autre.”
― André Gorz, Letter to D: A Love Story

“Nous aimerions chacun ne pas avoir à survivre à la mort de l'autre. Nous nous sommes souvent dit que si, par impossible, nous avions une seconde vie, nous voudrions la passer ensemble.”
― André Gorz, Letter to D: A Love Story

“love is the mutual fascination of two individuals based precisely on what is least definable about them, least-socialisable, most resistant to the roles and images of themselves that society imposes on them.”
― André Gorz, Letter to D: A Love Story

“Le Vieillissement sera mon adieu à l'adolescence, mon renoncement à ce que Deleuze-Guattari appelleront « l'illimitation du désir » et que Georges Bataille appelait « l'omnitude du possible » que l'on n'approche que par le refus indéfini de toute détermination : la volonté de n'être Rien se confond avec celle d'être Tout. À la fin du Vieillissement se trouve cette auto-exhortation : "Il faut accepter d'être fini : d'être ici et nulle part ailleurs, de faire ça et pas autre chose, maintenant et non jamais ou toujours […] d'avoir cette vie seulement.”
― André Gorz, Letter to D: A Love Story

“Dicevo pure: "Che cosa ci prova che tra dieci o vent'anni il nostro patto per la vita corrisponderà al desiderio di ciò che saremo diventati?".
La tua risposta non si poteva parare: "Se ti unisci con qualcuno per la vita, mettete le vostre vite in comune e tralasciate di fare ciò che divide o contrasta la vostra unione. La costruzione della vostra coppia è il vostro progetto comune, non avrete mai finito di rafforzarla, di adattarla, di riorientarla in funzione delle situazioni mutevoli. Noi saremo ciò che faremo insieme".”
― André Gorz, Letter to D: A Love Story

“Only, this was the thing: you'd provided me with the possibility of getting away from myself and making myself at home in another world. You were like a messenger from that world. With you, I could give my real self a rest. You were part and parcel of that dissolving of reality - myself included - that I'd been working on for seven or eight years through writing. For me, you were the herald out in front who showed me how to put the menacing world on hold. In that world I was a refugee whose existence was not legitimate, whose future never went beyond the three months of a temporary visa. I had no desire to come back to earth. I'd found a refuge in a magical experience and I wasn't about to let it get dragged down into reality. As far back as I can remember, I'd always sought not to exist. You've had to work for years on end to get me to accept the fact that I do exist. And I really don't think your work is over yet.”
― André Gorz, Letter to D: A Love Story

“Vais fazer oitenta e dois anos. Perdeste seis centímetros de altura, só pesas quarenta e cinco quilos e continuas bela, graciosa e apetecível. Vivemos juntos há cinquenta e oito anos e amo-te mais do que nunca. Sinto outra vez no fundo do meu peito um vazio devorador que só o calor do teu corpo contra o meu pode encher.»”
― André Gorz, Letter to D: A Love Story

“J'aimais que tu me réclames tout en me laissant tout le temps dont j'avais besoin.”
― André Gorz, Letter to D: A Love Story

“Avec toi je pouvais mettre ma réalité en vacances.”
― André Gorz, Letter to D: A Love Story

“Je tenais le mariage pour une institution bourgeoise ; considérais qu'il codifiait juridiquement et socialisait une relation qui, pour autant qu'elle était d'amour, liait deux personnes dans ce qu'elles avaient de moins social.”
― André Gorz, Letter to D: A Love Story

“J'avais besoin de théorie pour structurer ma pensée et t'objectais qu'une pensée non structurée menace toujours de sombrer dans l'empirisme et l'insignifiance. Tu répondais que la théorie menace toujours de devenir un carcan qui interdit de percevoir la complexité mouvante du réel. (...) Tu n'avais pas eu besoin des sciences cognitives pour savoir que sans intuitions ni affects il n'y a ni intelligence ni sens. Tes jugements revendiquaient imperturbablement le fondement de leur certitude vécue, communicante mais non démontrable. L'autorité - appelons-la éthique - de ces jugements n'a pas besoin du débat pour s'imposer. Tandis que l'autorité du jugement théorique s'effondre s'il ne peut emporter la conviction par le débat.”
― André Gorz, Letter to D: A Love Story

“I knew then and there that I didn't need any time to think; that if I let you go I'd spend the rest of my life longing for you. You were the first woman I was able to love body and soul, to feel deeply connected to. You were my first true love, to put it simply. If I wasn't capable of loving you for good, I'd never love anyone. I found words I'd never known how to say; words to tell you that I wanted us to be together for as long as we lived.”
― André Gorz, Letter to D: A Love Story

“Why do I say that I was responsible 'for the turn [your] life would take? That it was up to me 'to make [your] life livable?' In all, eleven lines of poison in three doses, over twenty pages; three tiny strokes that debase you and distort you, written seven years later, that rob us of the meaning of seven years of our life.

Who wrote those eleven lines? I mean: Who was I when I wrote those lines? I feel a painful need to give us back those seven years along with what you truly meant to me.”
― André Gorz, Letter to D: A Love Story