Connemara Quotes

“Though undoubtedly revolutionary in many ways, this new movement still seemed wedded to the old political obsession with infinitive verbs.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“Beautiful like memories of past vacations, like those familiar faces that flash through your mind at the smell of cut grass, or are resurrected when the afternoon sun filters through the blinds, stirring the memory of a nap in a house where you were once happy.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“But at Hélène’s age, sincere apologies were no longer enough. Every act was like a scar, a tattoo, and while your choices could take you far, your cowardice and your inaction were no less fearsome. On the practically vertical slope of adulthood, everything mattered.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“But at Hélène’s age, sincere apologies were no longer enough. Every act was like a scar, a tattoo, and while your choices could take you far, your cowardice and your inaction were no less fearsome.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“Love was tragic and temporary. Lust was infinite but bland. After that, you belonged to a world made in your image.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“The photos from the seventies had aged badly. Their hues seemed to have lost all life, greens turning diarrhea-colored, whites opalescent, muddying into a sludge of bland brownness.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“The stories that tablecloth could have told…In the weft of its fabric were all the secrets of a family, going back years and years.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“After centuries of relative dominion, these poor guys suddenly felt ill at ease in this world that had once seemed to fit them perfectly. The fact that there were so many of them made no difference. They felt cornered, outmoded, fundamentally inadequate, insulted by the Zeitgeist. Men raised as men, basic and cracked, relics of another age.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“This was how Christophe had realized that this life was not his. It had just been a bridge he had crossed, a pair of shoes he had borrowed, leaving him nothing from those first forty years but a string of blurred memories. Ultimately, all he had done was give his strength for a master plan he knew nothing about. The world had perpetuated itself through him, without ever asking him what he thought. When you looked at it objectively, it was enough to make you want to kill yourself.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“Now and then he would feel as if the world’s makeup had run, exposing its true face, naked and horrifying. These brief moments of lucidity were like deep dives into memory, bringing back flashes of the past, often while he was on the bus with the hockey team, his forehead pressed against the window, the landscape blurring past his eyes.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“Adolescence is premeditated murder, planned long in advance, and the body of their family as it used to be already lies dead by the side of the road. Now they must reinvent roles, accept new distances, to deal with the horror and the sudden kicks. The body is still warm. It twitches. But what used to exist—childhood and its tender moments, the unquestioned reign of adults with the kid at its center, cocooned and protected, vacations in La Grande-Motte and family Sundays at home—all of this has died.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“Of course, there were still photographs, that surprised look from the other side of time, and a baby monitor kept at the back of a drawer because you can’t bring yourself to throw it away. Days without him, days with him, love in a discontinuous current. But the worst was yet to come.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“For twenty years he has been watching them with unruffled stoicism, the teenagers unvarying from one generation to the next, always making out, cramming for tests, yelling at one another, messing around. Making one drink last three hours while they put the world to rights. But from his observation point, the world does not seem to change that much. His customers are always seventeen years old and worried about their exams.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“There was an ogre-like salesman with a garnet nose, a service manager with a gleaming face whose physiognomy reminded her faintly of a cephalopod, two court ushers who might easily have been sisters, and a man on his own, as tall and stooped as a Giacometti, well-known to everyone in this town, where he worked as a drawing teacher.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“Work, parents, kids, love, all the intimate crap that never goes well for anyone.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“Her friend’s journal is like a pack of candy that you eat in one go while swearing to yourself that each mouthful will be the last. She keeps turning to the next page, and then just one more…A world has opened up before her, so luxuriant in its jungle-like horror, its malarial beauty, that it makes her head spin. She feels everything at once: wet, excited, lost. Suddenly she laughs.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“Despite herself, however, somewhere deep inside she still had the reflexes of a poor person, a sort of cuckold’s instinct that enabled her to see straight through the stupidity of vertical orders, the fundamental mismatch between the good intentions of elegant people and the heavy desires of average lives.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“Every day, he repeats this necessary torture, and sometimes all of life seems to be summed up in that tableau: a steep slope in a small town, a kid on a bike, riding one centimeter farther before dark. The hill keeps pushing back but he refuses to give up. He has to hold firm. To change.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“As far as practice is concerned, however, the basics remain as they were, except that Coach Lukic has returned to his native Serbia and the under-sixteens are now coached by Anthony Gargano, a first-team player idolized by all the kids. He has two caps for the French national team and, even more impressive, he drives a Ducati. But he, too, is obsessed with passing. Pinball, he calls it.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“He lays a heavy, fatherly hand on Hélène’s shoulder, and feeling that weight upon her she is briefly reassured. It’ll be okay, she tells herself, before suddenly being overwhelmed by an inexplicable sadness. She hates being like this, her feelings like clothes in a washing machine, her heart riding a roller coaster.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“Christophe thought about that girl he’d wanted so desperately, and whom he had left. About that kid who was everything to him and for whom he could never find the time. The feeling of waste, weariness, the impossibility of going back. He had to keep living, though, and hoping, despite the countdown and the first white hairs. Better days would come. That was the song’s promise.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“In America, certain enforcers had become true legends. Intimidation was enshrined in the rules there, and a large part of the crowd turned up for precisely that—the electric shock, the impression that, at any moment, the game could genuinely become a matter of life and death.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“Four thousand eyes followed the same black dot as it shot around at a hundred fifty kilometers per hour. For two hours, everyone was gathered around the oval rink, hoping for goals, speed, and violence. The same desire filled every chest.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“Every word he spoke was wrapped in the heavy accent of local places—Les Hauts, Bussang, Le Tholy, La Bresse, cold spots, flower-bright meadows, vowels with circumflex accents—but no one should be fooled by such rustic appearances. During his five terms in office, he had crushed more than one ambitious man in J.M. Weston shoes.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“longs cheveux, un trésor depuis l’enfance ? Hélène en était pleine de ce temps compté, de ces bouts de quotidien qui composaient le casse-tête de sa vie. Par moments, elle repensait à son adolescence, les flemmes autorisées d’à quinze ans, les indolences du dimanche, et plus tard les lendemains de cuite à glander. Cette période engloutie qui avait tellement duré et semblait rétrospectivement si brève. Sa mère l’enguirlandait alors parce qu’elle passait des heures à s’étirer dans son lit au lieu de profiter du soleil dehors. À présent, le réveil sonnait à six heures tous les jours de la semaine et le week-end, tel un automate, elle se réveillait à six heures quand même.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“Then they would sleep the sleep of the just, a whole happy generation of proles who had finally gotten lucky and who thought that this moment was just how things were now, that there would be work and progress in perpetuity.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“She thinks about love the same way she thinks about a driver’s license: everyone does it, but she is somehow persuaded that she won’t be able to. She’ll never manage to change gear, look right and left, check the mirror, she’s too clumsy, too daydreamy, her mother is always telling her for God’s sake look where you’re going. Every time she washes the dishes, she breaks a plate. She can’t help it—she’s in her own little world.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“Oh yeah! I got sucked into this one day at the office. Wasted a whole afternoon on it. It’s a nightmare, this kind of thing.” Shoulder to shoulder, they spent a while laughing at those ridiculous faces, the surprising transformations, the stories that people told, the whole drama of lives spread over social networks.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“It’s a nightmare, this kind of thing.” Shoulder to shoulder, they spent a while laughing at those ridiculous faces, the surprising transformations, the stories that people told, the whole drama of lives spread over social networks.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara

“It was all there though: the decor, and the distribution of a moment when everything changed, a moment that still mattered even now—old friends betrayed, the new bestie, and the others forming the mild hell that she had wanted to escape, come what may. Ultimately, that photograph was merely a monument for the dead, a lie set in stone, the gravestone for her thirteen-year-old self.”
― Nicolas Mathieu, Connemara