David Foenkinos Quotes

Most couples love to tell each other their stories and assume their meeting had something exceptional about it; countless pairings formed under the most banal conditions are, all the same, spiced up with details that produce a minor thrill.

Definition of the Word Delicate, Since Defining Delicacy Isn't Enough for Understanding Delicacy 1. Subtle and subdued. A delicate flavor. 2. Showing fragility. Delicate crystal. 3. Requiring sensitive or careful handling. Delicate situation. 4. Characterized by subtle judgment, deftness. Delicate chess maneuvers.

But you need to have lived years in nothingness to understand how a person can suddenly become frightened by a possibility.

Today, the men from that meeting are frozen in photographs.
They are immortal, or rather: they must never be forgotten.
The villa has become a place of memorial.
I visited it one gloriously sunny day in July 2004.
You can walk through the horror.
The long table used for the meeting is frightening.
As if the objects had taken part in the crime.
The place with forever be charged with terror.
So this is what it means, when a chill runs down your spine.
I had never understood that expression before.
The physical manifestation of an invisible icy finger.
Tracing the vertebrae in your back.

Now, between them, there was literature.

Although she didn't know what to say. She was under the impression that she was going to have to go back and start again at zero, even relearn language. Maybe in the end all of them had been right to force her to socialize a bit, to force her to wash, dress, entertain. Her

charge of a six-person team that you belong to. You walked in just as I was daydreaming, and I didn't grasp the real situation at that moment." "But that moment was the realest of my life," protested Markus without thinking. It had come right out of his heart.

He was alone in the world, and the world was Natalie. Usually

Therein lies the magic of our paradoxes: the situation was so uncomfortable that he pulled through with elegance.

Charm took effect, and even progressed. Markus came out of it elegantly. He was smiling with his least Swedish smile possible, almost a kind of Spanish smile. He strung out some tasty anecdotes, skillfully mixed in cultural and personal references, successfully managed transitions from the intimate to the general. He gracefully unfurled a fine piece of engineering known as "man of the world.

Organizing a marriage is like forming a government after a war.

Time again for the waltz of smiles. Amazing how you sometimes make resolutions, tell yourself everything will be a certain way from now on, and then all it takes is a tiny movement of the lips to shatter your confidence in a certainty that seemed eternal.

Dictionaries stop where the heart starts.

Moreover, as usual, she wasn't able to live in the moment. Maybe that's what grief is: a permanent disconnect from here and now. She looked at the games adults played and felt detached. It was easy to tell herself: "I'm not here.".

Although prey to the dictates of physical desire, he remained no less a romantic man, believing that the realm of women could be shrunk to one woman.

She even wanted to get drunk. Yet something kept her feet on the ground. She could never truly escape her condition. She could drink as much as she wanted, but it wouldn't change anything. She was just there, in a state of complete lucidity, watching herself perform like an actress on a stage. Splitting herself in two, she was dumbfounded to see the woman she no longer was, someone who could exist in life, who could project appeal. It put all the details of her inability to exist in an even harsher light.

Thirteen years separate the death of her mother from that of her aunt.
And another thirteen passed between her mother's death and her grandmother's.
yes, exactly the same time lapse.
And all three died in almost exactly the same way.
A leap into the void.
Death has three different ages.
The girl, the mother, the grandmother.
So no age is worth living.
In the train that rolls toward the camp, Charlotte makes a calculation.
1940 + 13 = 1953.
So 1953 will be the year of her suicide.
If she doesn't die before that.

She must disappear for a time from the human surface,
And sacrifice everything for this,
To recreate herself from the depths of her world.

from Uppsala, a Swedish city that doesn't interest many people. Even the inhabitants of Uppsala* themselves are embarrassed; the name of their city sounds almost like an excuse. Sweden has the highest suicide rate in the world.

And then, one morning, you're startled to discover that you no longer feel this terrible burden. What a surprise to notice that the angst has disappeared. Why on that particular day? Why not later, or sooner? It's the totalitarian decision of our body.

Markus definitely wasn't comfortable. He was sorry about having long legs; as regrets go, it certainly was a useless one.* Not to mention another fact that amped up his torture: there's nothing worse than being seated next to a woman you're dying with desire to look at. The show was to his left, where she was, not on stage. Not only that, but what was he seeing? It was so-so. The fact that it was a Swedish play wasn't exactly helping matters! Had she done it on purpose? As if that weren't enough, the playwright had studied in Uppsala. Might as well have dinner at his parents'.

For years, I took notes.
I pored over her work incessantly.
I quoted or mentioned Charlotte in several of my novels.
I tried to write this book so many times.
But how?
Should I be present?
Should I fictionalize her story?
What form should my obsession take?
I began, I tried, then I gave up.
I couldn't manage to string two sentences together.
At every point, I felt blocked.
Impossible to go on.
It was a physical sensation, an oppression.
I felt the need to move to the next line in order to breathe.

So, I realized that I had to write it like this.

We may finally ask ourselves whether coincidence really does exist. Maybe everybody we run into is walking around near us with the undying hope of meeting us? To think of it, it's a fact that they often seem out of breath.

as usual, she wasn't able to live in the moment. Maybe that's what grief is: a permanent disconnect from the here and now.

the fact that he'd never before seen her in the evening. He was just short of being astounded that she could exist at this hour. He must have been the type who thought that beauty gets put in a box at night. But it couldn't be true, no, because there she was, facing him.