Violette Leduc Quotes

We gave you a perfectly good language and you f***ed up.

Like love, grief fades in and out.

Usually, when you're talking about work with other writers it's because something seriously bad is going on with your work and you've absolutely thrown out a lifeline and you're hoping that someone will help you with something. Either there's some bad feeling you have about the work, or sometimes it's not specific - just kind of solidarity.

When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish.

They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.

Danger lurks when people are dissociated and detached from their own story or feelings.

All those men who end up disappointing you. After a while, you don't even want to have feelings anymore. You just want to get on with your life.

there was something about that city, though it didn't let me feel guilty that I had no feeling for the things so many others needed. it let me alone.

I had neither the good sense nor the good feeling to know that this was all my fault, and that if I had been easier with Joe, Joe would have been easier with me. I felt impatient of him and out of temper with him; in which condition he heaped coals of fire on my head.

The extremists are talking too loudly, and everyone is convinced that only he is on the right side. It’s not just Jews against Arabs. It’s the Orthodox versus those who don’t think they can keep all six hundred and thirteen commandments of the Bible. It’s rich people versus poor people. At some point, something came over Israel so that everyone has his own ideas—and everyone else is an enemy. It’s a dialogue among deaf people and it is getting more and more serious.

human relationships simply aren't durable. I think back to the women in my life. they seem non-existent.

It is passivity that dulls feeling.

Any thoughts of guilt, any feelings of regret, had faded. The desert had baked them out.

Without awareness of bodily feeling and attitude, a person becomes split into a disembodied spirit and a disenchanted body.

He wasn't surprised. He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you've done all the work to get something you don't even want it anymore.

I have taken a pill to kill The thin Papery feeling.

When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic - here on Sixth Avenue, for instance - I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound... I don’t need sound to talk to me.

When you're busy blocking out difficult emotions and feelings, you're not going to feel the good stuff, either.

Your partner cannot read your mind, so talk to your partner about how you're feeling and what you need.

I can see time," whispered Mogget, so softly that his words were lost.

Her laugh was sad and taciturn, seemingly detached from any feeling of the moment, like something she kept in the cupboard and took out only when she had to, using it with no feeling of ownership, as if the infrequency of her smiles had made her forget the normal way to use them.

We should all know this: that listening, not talking, is the gifted and great role, and the imaginative role.

It’s so difficult to describe [depression] to someone who’s never been there, because it’s not sadness. I know sadness. Sadness is to cry and to feel. But it’s that cold absence of feeling — that really hollowed-out feeling.

We're all human beings and we all have feelings. And we all live in this industrial meat grinder where we don't really understand love anymore.

You have an incredible body." He reaches out to touch my stomach. I feel no pleasure in his compliment or his touch, only impatience. This is the only feeling. I feel like the paper on which my mood chart is printed.