Home > Work > Things I Don't Want to Know
1 " To become a WRITER I had to learn to INTERRUPT, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then LOUDER, and then to just speak in my own voice which is NOT LOUD AT ALL. "
― Deborah Levy , Things I Don't Want to Know
2 " It occurred to me that both Maria and I were on the run in the twenty-first century, just like George Sand whose name was also Amantine was on the run in the nineteenth century, and Maria whose name was also Zama was looking for somewhere to recover and rest in the twentieth. We were on the run from the lies concealed in the language of politics from myths about our character and our purpose in life. We were on the run from our own desires too probably, whatever they were. "
3 " Smoking cheap Spanish filthy sock-tobacco under a pine tree was so much better than trying to hold it together on escalators. There was something comforting about being literally lost when I was lost in every other way... "
4 " When happiness is happening it feels as if nothing else happened before it, it is a sensation that happens only in the present tense. "
5 " Yes, there had been many times I called my daughters back to zip up their coats. All the same, I knew they would rather be cold and free. "
6 " Like everything that involves love, our children made us happy beyond measure – and unhappy too – but never as miserable as the twenty-first century Neo-Patriarchy made us feel. It required us to be passive but ambitious, maternal but erotically energetic, self-sacrificing but fulfilled – we were to be Strong Modern Women while being subjected to all kinds of humiliations, both economic and domestic. If we felt guilty about everything most of the time, we were not sure what it was we had actually done wrong." (from "Things I Don't Want to Know" by Deborah Levy) "
7 " The fact that lipstick and mascara and eye shadow were called 'Make Up' thrilled me. Everywhere in the world there were made up people and most of them were women. "
8 " We did not yet entirely understand that Mother, as imagined and politicized by the Societal System, was a delusion. The world loved the delusion more than it loved the mother. "
9 " When a female writer walks a female character into the center of her literary enquiry (or a forest) and this character starts to project shadow and light all over the place, she will have to find a language that is in part to do with unknotting the ways in which she has been put together by the Societal System in the first place. She will have to be canny in how she sets about doing this because she will have many delusions of her own. In fact it would be best if she was uncanny. "
10 " 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. "
11 " Mother was The Woman the whole world had imagined to death. It proved very hard to re-negotiate the world's nostalgic phantasy about our purpose in life...we did not yet entirely understand that Mother, as imagined and politicized by the societal system, was a delusion. "
