Quotes by Irène Némirovsky

Waiting is erotic

Deep within everyones heart there always remains a sense of longing for that hour, that summer, that one brief moment of blossoming. For several weeks or months, rarely longer, a beautiful young woman lives outside ordinary life. She is intoxicated. She feels as if she exists beyond time, beyond its laws; she experiences not the monotonous succession of days passing by, but moments of intense, almost desperate happiness.

Heureux sont ceux qui peuvent aimer et haïr sans feinte, sans détour, sans nuance.

...because all happiness is contagious, and disarms the spirit of hatred.

But what is certain is that in five, ten or twenty years, this problem unique to our time, according to him, will no longer exist, it will be replaced by others...Yet this music, the sound of this rain on the windows, the great mournful creaking of the cedar tree in the garden outside, this moment, so tender, so strange in the middle of war, this will never change, not this, this is forever.

The breath of wind that moved them was still chilly on this day in May; the flowers gently resisted, curling up with a kind of trembling grace and turning their pale stamens towards the ground. The sun shone through them, revealing a pattern of interlacing, delicate blue veins, visible through the opaque petals; this added something alive to the flowers fragility, to its ethereal quality, something almost human ,in the way that human can mean frailty and endurance both at the same time. The wind could ruffle these ravishing creations but it couldnt destroy them, or even crush them; they swayed there, dreamily; they seemed ready to fall but held fast to their slim strong branches-...

...she cried because prejudice outlives passion and because she was sentimentally patriotic.

What separates or unites people is not their language, their laws, their customs, their principles, but the way they hold their knife and fork.

Believe me, my boy, women dont love a man for himself but as a weapon against other women.

For there comes a time in life when the pity previously reserved only for children takes on a different form, a time when we study the faces of old people and sense that one day we will be just like them. And that is the moment when early childhood comes to an end.

The way a man drinks in company tells you nothing about him, but the way he drinks when alone reveals, without his realizing it, the very depths of his soul.

Were becoming slaves; the war scatters us in all directions, takes away everything we own, snatches the bread from out of our mouths; let me at least retain the right to decide my own destiny, to laugh at it, defy it, escape it if I can. A slave? Better to be a slave than a dog who thinks hes free as he trots along behind his master. She listened to the sound of men and horses passing by. They dont even realise theyre slaves, she said to herself, and I, I would be just like them if a sense of pity, solidarity, the spirit of the hive forced me to refuse to be happy.

How tolerable misfortunes appear when they affect only other people! How strong the human body seems when its another mans flesh that bleeds! How easy it is to look death in the face when its another mans turn!

“Heureux sont ceux qui peuvent aimer et haïr sans feinte, sans détour, sans nuance.”

“...because all happiness is contagious, and disarms the spirit of hatred.”