August Blue Quotes

“My words were smaller than my feelings at that moment. I had spent my life finding diplomatic words. Am I a diplomat then? Isn’t it hard enough to play Beethoven”
― Deborah Levy, August Blue

“That was the old composition and I had walked out of that world. I had literally walked off the stage.”
― Deborah Levy, August Blue

“Yes, well, it's two contradictory thoughts, she said, the possibility of ending my life and wanting more life. So what? And here are two more contradictions: I don't believe in God, but I talk to something like God. I ask this presence to feel for me when I have cut down my own feelings.”
― Deborah Levy, August Blue

“There are vertical swimmers and horizontal swimmers, she said. I myself have sometimes thought I will become a vertical swimmer. No one says I have to do the third act of my life. It is always nasty. If I become ill in old age, I have not ruled it out.”
― Deborah Levy, August Blue

“Capitalism sold a flat white to me as if it were a cup of freedom.”
― Deborah Levy, August Blue

“Don’t fly away. We are where we are. We are where we are, I repeated. And where are you, Elsa? Perhaps there was no one in the world who better understood me. And misunderstood me. His main task when I was a child was to focus my wandering attention. His question went back a long way. Now I heard it as a refrain, a repeated musical phrase. I’m here with you, I replied. My words were muffled under the mask. It began to dawn on me, at that moment, that I was going to lose him. It didn’t matter if I wore a mask.”
― Deborah Levy, August Blue

“We agreed that whatever happened next in the world, we would still rub conditioner into our hair after we washed it and comb it through to the ends, we would soften our lips with rose-, strawberry-, and cherry-scented balms, and though we would be interested to see a wolf perched in a lonely mountain, we liked our household animals to betray their savage nature and live with us in our reality, which was not theirs. They would lie in our laps and let us stroke them through waves of virus, wars, drought and floods and we would try not to transmit our fear to them.”
― Deborah Levy, August Blue

“that most of us don’t go through with it, but we have at least walked our minds on this forbidden pasture and let them graze there?”
― Deborah Levy, August Blue

“dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.”
― Deborah Levy, August Blue

“[My foster parents] offered me their love but I couldn’t feel it.”
― Deborah Levy, August Blue

“I cancelled everything I thought I was and let in everything else that came to me.”
― Deborah Levy, August Blue