Edouard Leve Quotes

If you were still alive, you would perhaps have become a stranger to me. Dead, you are as alive as you are vivid. Your

The last time I saw you, you were wearing a white cotton shirt. You were standing upright with your wife on the lawn, in the sunlight, in front of the chateau, at my brother's wedding. You shared in the enthusiasm of the ceremony. For my part, I felt distanced from it. I didn't recognize my family in this mundane get-together. You didn't seem put off by the bourgeois ceremony, or by my brother's choice to have his love approved by third parties, even when these were distant third parties. You didn't have the sad and absent look you normally took on at public gatherings. You smiled, watching the people, a little tipsy from the wine and the sun, chatting on the large lawn between the white stone façade and the two-hundred-year-old cedar tree. I often wondered, after your death, if that smile, the last one I saw from you, was mocking, or if instead it was the kindly smile of someone who knew that soon he would no longer partake in earthly pleasures. You didn't regret leaving these behind, but neither were you averse to enjoying them a little longer.

Your taste for literature did not come from your father, who read little, but from your mother, who taught it. You wondered how, being so different, they could have formed a union; but you noted that in you there was a mixture of the violence of the one and the gentleness of the other. Your father exerted his violence on others. Your mother was sympathetic to the suffering of others. One day you directed the violence you had inherited toward yourself. You dished it out like your father and you took it like your mother.

Speaking commits me Listening teaches me Silence tempers me Birth

A self excused is a self accused.

When you were awake, stretched out in your bed in the dark, shutters drawn, your thoughts would flow freely. They would grow obscure when you got up and opened the curtains. The violence of daylight would efface the nocturnal clarity. In the daytime, people were barriers, dividing you up, preventing you from hearing what you listened to at night: the voice of your brain.

You used to give yourself over to endless sessions of doubt. You would claim to be an expert on the subject. But doubting would tire you so much that you would end up doubting doubt itself. I saw you one day at the end of an afternoon of solitary speculation. You were unmoving and petrified. Running several kilometers in a deep forest full of ravines and pitfalls would have exhausted you less.

I am not looking to seduce a wearer of Birkenstocks. I do not like the big toe.

Only once can I say "I'm dying" without telling a lie. The best day of my life may already be behind me.

You had felt idle in this city through which you had paced only to kill time. But the emptiness that you believed yourself confronted with was an illusion: you had filled those moments with sensations all the more powerful in that nothing and no one had distracted you from them.

Your suicide makes the lives of those who outlive you more intense. Should they be threatened by boredom, or tshould the absurdity of their lives leap out at them from the curve of some cruel mirror, let them remember you, and the pain of existence will seem preferable to the disquietude of no longer being.

Once you confessed to someone that you had been very depressed when dining with her several months earlier. She was stunned, discovering her blindness like a time bomb. And you, faithful, kept a straight face. You

You would renounce organizing your future. You would let yourself be guided by the randomness of encounters and events, indifferent to one choice over another.

Since you seldom spoke, you were rarely wrong. You seldom spoke because you seldom went out. If you did go out, you listened and watched. Now, since you no longer speak, you will always be right. In truth, you do still speak: through those, like me, who bring you back to life, and interrogate you. We hear your responses and admire their wisdom. If the facts turned out to contradict your counsel, we blame ourselves for having misinterpreted you. Yours are the truths, ours are the errors.

You didn't identify with happy people, and in your excessiveness you projected onto those who had failed in everything, or succeeded in nothing.

Your taste for abbreviation meant that instead of finishing the works you undertook, you finished yourself. You

I want this epitaph engraved on my tombstone: "See you soon

You used to believe that with age you would become less unhappy, because you then would have reasons to be sad. When you were still young, your suffering was inconsolable because you believed it to be unfounded. Your suicide was scandalously beautiful…You died because you searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void. We shall have to wait for death before we can know what it is that you found. Or before leaving off knowing anything at all, if it is to be silence and emptiness that awaits us.

You didn't like to travel. You rarely went abroad. You would spend your time in your bedroom. It seemed useless to you to travel for miles in order to stay in a place less comfortable than your own.

A self accused is a self excused." You

This was perhaps what you feared: to become inert in a body that still breathes, drinks, and feeds itself. To commit suicide in slow motion.

Your shutters were closed. The room was bathed in a soft red light. You were listening to "I Talk to the Wind" by King Crimson [...] It made me think of a nightclub. It was broad daylight outside.

I have no desire to change things because I am the youngest in my family. I like meeting new people when I travel: these brief and inconsequential encounters have the thrill of beginnings and the sadness of separations.

Misrecognizing the future, however, could render it desirable.

Until the age of twelve I thought I was gifted with the power to shape the future, but this power was a crushing burden, it manifested itself in the form of threats, I had to take just so many steps before I got to the end of the sidewalk or else my parents would die in a car accident, I had to close the door thinking of some favorable outcome, for example passing a test, or else I'd fail, I had to turn off the light not thinking about my mother getting raped, or that would happen, one day I couldn't stand having to close the door a hundred times before I could think of something good, or to spend fifteen minutes turning off the light the right way, I decided enough was enough, the world could fall apart, I didn't want to spend my life saving other people, that night I went to bed sure the next day would bring the apocalypse, nothing happened, I was relieved but a little bit disappointed to discover I had no power.

In their beginnings, events preserve the potential that they lose in their completion. Desire prolongs itself so long as it is not achieved.

Time is lacking for me
Space is enough for me
The void attracts me

At the beach girls arouse me less than in the library.

This selfishness of your suicide displeased you. But, all things considered, the lull of death won out over life's painful commotion.

When I am coming back from a trip, the best part isn't going through the airport or getting home, but the taxi ride in between: you're still travelling, but not really.

You are like the actor who, at the end of the play, with a final word, reveals that he is a different character than the one he appeared to be playing.

The eve of a long trip is filled with both exaltation and anxiety, but the day itself is a pure euphoria of action, and anxiety returns in the middle of the trip, at an empty moment, when the exoticism of the setting out has not yet given way to that of going home.

Fifteen years old is the middle of my life, regardless of when I die.

Life is proposed to me
My name is passed on to me
My body is imposed on me

You spoke to strangers for hours. Afterward you walked the streets in search of other cafes, but they were closed. You stretched out on the park benches of a square near the Gare Saint-Lazare, and you remarked on the shape of the clouds. At six o'clock you had breakfast. At seven you took the first train home. When, the next day, your friends repeated to you the words you had spoken to strangers in the cafe, you remembered nothing of them. It was as though someone else inside you had spoken. You recognized neither your words, nor your thoughts, but you liked them better than you would have if you had remembered saying them. Often all it took was for someone else to speak your own words back to you for you to like them.

To describe my life precisely would take longer than to live it.

A dictionary resembles the world more than a novel does, because the world is not a coherent sequence of actions but a constellation of things perceived. It is looked at, unrelated things congregate, and geographic proximity gives them meaning. If events follow each other, they are believed to be a story. But in a dictionary, time doesn't exist: ABC is neither more nor less chronological than BCA. To portray your life in order would be absurd: I remember you at random. My brain resurrects you through stochastic details, like picking marbles out of a bag.

In the midst of this utopia, which only your fellow lone voyagers would perceive, you used to transgress society's rules unknowingly, and no one would hold you accountable for it. You would mistakenly enter private residences, go to concerts to which you had not been invited, eat at community banquets where you could only guess the community's identity when they started giving speeches. Had you behaved like this in your own country, you would have been taken for a liar or a fool. But the improbable ways of a foreigner are accepted. Far from your home, you used to taste the pleasure of being mad without being alienated, of being an imbecile without renouncing your intelligence, of being an impostor without culpability.

it sometimes happened that you would, in the middle of your exertions, be discouraged by the absurdity of what you were in the process of doing: athletic exertion was vanity. You engaged in it less for the joy of the act than in order to exhaust yourself.

You were said to have died of suffering. But you died because you searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void.

I don't write in the morning, my brain isn't up to it yet, I don't write in the afternoon, I'm too sad, I write from five o'clock on, I need to have been awake a long time, my body relaxed from a day's fatigue.

To know makes me grow
Not to know harms me
To forget frees me.