Anne Garréta Quotes

When I close my eyes, I see my soul as a screen crisscrossed with flowing, intertwined lines; architectural straight lines of a volume uncertain of its limits, exposed on all sides; a fragile construction, by turns knocked down, invaded, uprooted, robbed of its foundations, mined by all those embraces in which it happily prostitutes itself.

Irony alone is damning.
The flesh will be bland and you will believe you are forever reading the same book.

Passion–arbitrary, blind, and indifferent–needs only to feed off its own intensity to achieve the paroxysm of its pleasure: its object is of no consequence, chosen arbitrarily and without discrimination.

For life is too short to resign ourselves to reading poorly written books and sleeping with women we don't love.

I concluded that making love without laughing was as bad as gifting a book written in a language the recipient does not know.

By distancing myself from the world, I was squandering my destiny: such was the malediction of recognizing the world's infamy but not allowing myself to spit in its face.

In a hollow of smashed pavement at my feet is a puddle of stagnant water frozen on the surface; it looks like a pane of ancient glass studded with detritus and trapped air bubbles.

Before, I was mourning the present; today I mourn a past that was never present.

I was running after the sublime, where everything is good. I was chasing after an image of ruffled sails that raise themselves like a phantom ship on a sea of oil, drifting, coming together, breaking free at the command of imperceptible trade winds, trailing around an infinite sorrow to the four corners of the stage. And whether the ship was a galley, a schooner, a merchant ship, or a privateer vessel didn't matter. What did I care whether it put up its sails or slowly stripped itself bare? Its wandering was what moved me.

All of her mannerisms, even her way of sitting, are of a perfect femininity. Or: how to occupy the least possible amount of space in the world.

Trying to forget through reading, I ended up forgetting everything, even reaching a state of self-oblivion, which alone is able to appease suffering: a blackout in the broken dream of this narrative.

I was the shadow of a body that ignored me; I was also the source of light that produced that shadow. All that came back to me was a projection of myself. A*** was merely a parasite interposed between my consciousness and my unfailing tendency to diffract the real.

I was haunted by the possibility of settling into a place long enough for time's passing to become tangible.

For six months, from October to March, I succumbed to my natural tendency for reclusion, living between my bed and my desk.

I had thought that I would never be able to grow tired of loving, but one night I woke to an absence of love and felt no torture: it was the absence of this tortute that truly scared me, that tortured me