Édouard Louis Quotes

People always think their own lives are so fascinating, and yes they realize everyone else thinks the same, but still they tell themselves that everyone else is wrong and they're right.

Although she is an angry woman, she is not one who knows what to do with the hatred that never leaves her.

Where is history? The history they taught at school was not your own. We were learning world history, and you were left out.

Among those who have everything, I have never seen a family go to the seashore just to celebrate a political decision, because for them politics changes almost nothing. This is something I realized when I went to live in Paris, far away from you: the ruling class may complain about a left-wing government, they may complain about a right-wing government, but no government ever ruins their digestion, no government ever breaks their backs, no government ever inspires a trip to the beach. Politics never changes their lives, at least not much. What's strange, too, is that they're the ones who engage in politics, though it has almost no effect on their lives. For the ruling class, in general, politics is a question of aesthetics: a way of seeing themselves, of seeing the world, of constructing a personality. For us it was life or death.

your back had been mangled by the factory, mangled by the life you were forced to live, by the life that wasn't yours, that wasn't yours because you never got to live a life of your own, because you lived on the outskirts of your life - because of all that you stayed at home, and usually they were the ones who came over.

You were as much a victim of the violence you inflicted as of the violence you endured.

The things we remember most clearly are always those that bring us shame.

Drinking brought oblivion. The world was responsible, but how could you blame the world, the world that imposed a life that the people around us had no choice but to try to forget - with drinking, by drinking.

Last month, when I came to see you, you asked me just before I left, Are you still involved in politics? The word still was a reference to my first year in high school, when I belonged to a radical leftist party and we argued because you thought I'd get myself into trouble if I took part in illegal demonstrations. Yes, I told you, more and more involved. You let three or four seconds go by. Then you said, You're right. You're right - what we need is a revolution.

There is a will that exists, a desperate, continual, constantly renewed effort to place some people on a level below you, not to be on the lowest rung of the social ladder.

What we call history is nothing but the story of the same emotions, the same joys, reproduced across bodies and time

Maybe what she meant was that obviously she wasn't a lady because there was no way she could be. To be ordinary, as if pride were not the first manifestations of shame.

I've been trying to construct a memory that would let me undo the past, that would amplify it and destroy it, so that the more I remember and the more I lose myself in the images that remain, the less they have to do with me.