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81 " Beckett described sorrow becoming ‘a thing you can keep adding to all your life … like a stamp or an egg collection’. "
― Deborah Levy , The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography
82 " To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be "
― Deborah Levy , The Man Who Saw Everything
83 " That night, in the deep heat of Greece, devoured by mosquitoes and reminiscences, I was thinking about all the doors I had closed in my life and what it would have taken to keep them ajar. "
― Deborah Levy , Real Estate
84 " As I bit into the sweet orange flesh of the apricot, I found myself thinking about some of the women, the mothers who had waited with me in the school playground while we collected our children. Now that we were mothers we were all shadows of our former selves, chased by the women we used to be before we had children. We didn’t really know what to do with her, this fierce, independent young woman who followed us about, shouting and pointing the finger while we wheeled our buggies in the English rain. We tried to answer her back but we did not have the language to explain that we were not women who had merely ‘acquired’ some children – we had metamorphosed (new heavy bodies, milk in our breasts, hormonally programmed to run to our babies when they cried) into someone we did not entirely understand." (from "Things I Don't Want to Know" by Deborah Levy) "
― Deborah Levy
85 " She swallows and swallows the water. And as she swallows she swallows the possibility she will always be alone. Swallows the river that will flow into the sea that is made from other waters that have flowed from mountains and hills, that will leak into oceans. She swallows geography, learns to swim in changing tides and temperatures, learns different strokes of the arms and legs, learns to speak in many tongues. She does this because she has no choice but to do so, and she comes out of the river to find him there, holding her earrings in his hand, and he says, ‘But they don’t fit. Who are you?’" (from "Swallowing Geography" by Deborah Levy) "
― Deborah Levy , Swallowing Geography
86 " You are history "
87 " It is so mysterious to want to suppress women. It is even more mysterious when women want to suppress women. I can only think we are so very powerful that we need to be suppressed all the time. "
88 " I was also searching for a house in which I could live and work and make a world at my own pace, but even in my imagination this home was blurred, undefined, not real, or not realistic, or lacked realism. "
89 " Empathy is more painful than medusa stings. "
― Deborah Levy , Hot Milk
90 " Next year he would suggest they hire a chalet on the edge of an icy fjord in Norway, as far away from the Jacobs family as possible. "
― Deborah Levy , Swimming Home
91 " It smelt of coconut ice cream and sweat and the Mediterranean sea. I "
92 " We have travelled a long distance from the cow with a bucket of raw milk under its udder. We are a long way from home.’ This "
93 " She is drinking peach tea in the plaza and she is too hot because her blue and black checked shirt is for winter not for summer in Andalucía. I think she thinks she’s a cowboy in her work shirt, always alone with no one to look at the mountain horizon at night and say my god those stars. "
94 " It is not enough to feel love. More important is how we express love. "
― Deborah Levy , The Unloved
95 " I had lost my job. I was no longer officially a minor historian. Perhaps I was history itself, flailing around in a number of directions, sometimes all of them at the same time. "
96 " I might one day risk falling in love again, but I was not going to lose my heart to the cardiologist. "
97 " When our father does the things he needs to do in the world, we understand it is his due. If our mother does the things she needs to do in the world, we feel she has abandoned us. It is a miracle she survives our mixed messages, written in society’s most poisoned ink. It is enough to drive her mad. "
98 " It was not that easy to convey to him, a man much older than she was, that the world was her world too. "
99 " He doesn’t care about his own life so he doesn’t care about the lives of others. "
100 " Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely. "