Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Rituals are magical.
I flew on a plane the week after 9/11.
Writing plays fast and loose with the past.
My vacations last one hour. Then I get bored, impatient.
All that remains is dreammaking and strange remembrance.
Chaste love happens all the time, far more frequently than adultery.
Some people have an identity. I have an alibi. I have a shadow self.
The first thing a writer needs to know is what kind of writer he/she is.
Irene Nemirovsky was a prolific writer punctiliously devoted to her craft.
You cannot understand what it means to be poor until you have suffered it.
Am I the only person who wishes he could escape his own life for a few hours?
The problem with Egypt is that there is no public trust. There is no trust, period.
'My Night at Maud's,' 'Claire's Knee,' 'Chloe in the Afternoon' are grafted onto my life.
Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second. But then perhaps this is what lovers are.
I cannot write if there is a sense of plenitude. I have to hypothesize that there is a loss.
In Alexandria, my birthplace and my home, all streets bearing Jewish names have been renamed.
Whoever said the soul and the body met in the pineal gland was a fool. It's the asshole, stupid.
An exile reads change the way he reads time, memory, self, love, fear, beauty: in the key of loss.
I tolerate lots of people I have no patience or respect for. Then, as soon as I can, I rat on them.
I like to read the paper online. And I love email. And I love nothing better than to be interrupted.
At one hundred, surely you learn to overcome loss and grief—or do they hound you till the bitter end?
For the religious, Passover is the grateful remembrance of a homeward journey after years of suffering.
My family were finally kicked out of Egypt in 1965 for being Jewish. We managed to remain longer than most.
Rituals are the building blocks of life, my way of cobbling an entire summer together from incidental wisps.
Nothing would have shocked Proust more than to hear that his work was perceived as difficult or inaccessibly rarefied.
'Almost' can be a polite way of saying something definitely. It withholds the obvious and dangles it just long enough.
If I could have him like this in my dreams every night of my life, I'd stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest.
Exiles see double, feel double, are double. When exiles see one place, they're also seeing - or looking for - another behind it.
We are, each one of us, not just defined by the arrangement of protein molecules in our cells, but also by the things we call our own.
'Almost' is about uncertainty soon to be dismissed but not quite dispelled. 'Almost' is about revelation to come but not entirely promised.
With ritual, I punctuate my days till they no longer belong to who I am today but to who I'll be when I look back in days and years to come.
Losing his wealth, his home, the life he had built, killed my father. He didn't die right away; it took four decades of exile to finish him off.
Egypt wants to be young again. Israel must show it never grew old. Egypt wants to wake up and dream again. Israel must learn to dream though it cannot sleep.
I write - so it would seem - to recapture, to preserve and return to the past, though I might just as easily be writing to forget and put that past behind me.
Rituals are how we step into our private field of dreams, a small Elysium all our own. Rituals are made not just for us, but for those we want to pass them on to.
As irony would have it, the very person who inspired me to write a memoir... was the only person to be ejected from it. My brother didn't appear in 'Out of Egypt.'
I may write about place and displacement, but what I'm really writing about is dispersion, evasion, ambivalence: not so much a subject as a move in everything I write.
Marseilles, Barcelona, Trieste, Istanbul - each romances the Mediterranean in its own fashion, mostly by embracing the sea in sweeping C-shaped bays that date back to antiquity.
'Almost' is all about gradations and nuance and about suggestion and shades. Not quite a red wine, but not crimson, not purple either, or maroon; come to think of it, 'almost' Bordeaux.
To those of us who have seen all of Eric Rohmer's films, it is impossible not to remember when, where, with whom we saw each one. I even remember the second and third time I saw his films.
Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Proust - not exactly authors one expects to whiz through or take lightly, but like all works of genius, they are meant to be read out loud and loved.
Whenever we're having a great time, we're already anticipating the day when we will remember this great time. Many of us live in that unreal area between the past, the present, and the future.
As a memoirist, I may claim to write the easier-to-remember things, but I could also just be writing to sweep them away. 'Don't bother me about my past,' I'll say, 'It's out in paperback now.'
I suddenly realized that we were on borrowed time, that time is always borrowed, and that the lending agency exacts its premium precisely when we are least prepared to pay and need to borrow more.
With Eric Rohmer - as with Mozart, Austen, James, and Proust - we need to remember that art is seldom about life, or not quite about life. Art is about discovery and design and reasoning with chaos.
It is Proust's implacable honesty, his reluctance to cut corners or to articulate what might have been good enough or credible enough in any other writer that make him the introspective genius he is.
What great writers have done to cities is not to tell us what happens in them, but to remember what they think happened or, indeed, might have happened. And so Dickens reinvented London, Joyce, Dublin, and so on.
I can't forget the scene in 'My Night at Maud's' when the very pious engineer in the business suit decides to sit on Maud's bed while she is lying under the covers with only a T-shirt on, determined to seduce him.
No one starts as a self-hater. But rack up all of your mistakes and take a large enough number of wrong turns in life and soon you stop trying to forgive yourself. Everywhere you look you find shame or failure staring back.
As we walked, I began to wonder what the opposite of molting was and why, unlike the body, which sheds everything, the soul cannot let go but compiles and accumulates, growing annual rings around the things it wants and dreams and remembers