Top 50 Annie Ernaux Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “Pain cannot be kept intact, it needs to be “processed,” converted into humor.”

— Annie Ernaux

2. “To exist is to drink oneself without thirst.”

— Annie Ernaux

3. “She teaches me that the world is made to be pounced on and enjoyed, and that there is absolutely no reason at all to hold back.”

— Annie Ernaux

4. “I realize that I have left part of myself in a place where I shall probably never come back.”

— Annie Ernaux

5. “Nunca he escrito para que sea bonito o para hacer una frase bella. Lo que yo escojo es la frase justa.”

— Annie Ernaux

6. “Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.”

— Annie Ernaux

7. “To grow old is to fade, to become transparent.”

— Annie Ernaux

8. “Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my writing is to find out whether other people have done or felt the same things or, if not, for them to consider experiencing such things as normal. Maybe I would also like them to live out these very emotions in turn, forgetting that they had once read about them somewhere.”

— Annie Ernaux

9. “When I was a child, luxury was fur coats, evening dresses, and villas by the sea. Later on, I thought it meant leading the life of an intellectual. Now I feel that it is also being able to live out a passion for a man or a woman.”

— Annie Ernaux

10. “In the humdrum routine of personal existence, History did not matter. We were simply happy or unhappy, depending on the day. The more immersed we were in work and family, said to be reality, the greater was our sense of unreality.”

— Annie Ernaux

11. “I experienced pleasure like a future pain.”

— Annie Ernaux

12. “I started to make a literary being of myself, someone who lives as if her experiences were to be written down someday.”

— Annie Ernaux

13. “She feels as if a book is writing itself just behind her; all she has to do is live. But there is nothing.”

— Annie Ernaux

14. “One cannot see the future of something learned.”

— Annie Ernaux

15. “A vague and immense desire to create was in the air. Everyone claimed to be devoted to an artistic activity, or planned to be. All activities were equal, they agreed, and instead of painting or playing the flute, one could always create oneself through psychoanalysis.”

— Annie Ernaux

16. “From the very beginning, and throughout the whole of our affair, I had the privilege of knowing what we all find out in the end: the man we love is a complete stranger.”

— Annie Ernaux

17. “I do not wish to explain my passion – that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify – I just want to describe it.”

— Annie Ernaux

18. “In my student bathroom, I had given birth to both life and death.”

— Annie Ernaux

19. “I shall try to conjure up each of the sentences engraved in my memory which were either so unbearable or so comforting to me at the time that the mere thought of them today engulfs me in a wave of horror or sweetness.”

— Annie Ernaux

20. “She has no name for that feeling of utter abandonment, nor the feeling that comes over her on fair days, when she stands in the courtyard from the photo, and the voice of the loudspeaker booms front behind the trees, and the music and commercials run together in an unintelligible blur. It is as if she were standing outside the fete, separated from some earlier thing.”

— Annie Ernaux

21. “When I made love and climaxed, I felt that my body was basically no different from that of a man.”

— Annie Ernaux

22. “We scribbled down writers’ reflections on life, discovered the joys of describing ourselves to ourselves with shimmering turns of phrase, ‘existence is to drink oneself without thirst.’ We were overcome by nausea and a feeling of the absurd.”

— Annie Ernaux

23. “There is no such thing as a lesser truth.”

— Annie Ernaux

24. “Gone with the Wind” are just as decisive as the Oedipus complex.”

— Annie Ernaux

25. “Cand eram copil, pentru mine, luxul insemna mantouri de blana, rochii lungi si vile pe malul marii. Mai tarziu, am crezut ca inseamna sa duci o viata de intelectual. Acum mi se pare ca inseamna si sa poti trai o pasiune pentru un barbat sau o femeie.”

— Annie Ernaux

26. “Today smugglers are vilified and pursued like abortionists were thirty years ago. No one questions the laws and world order that condone their existence. Yet surely, among those who trade in refugees, as among those who once traded in foetuses, there must be some sense of honor.”

— Annie Ernaux

27. “All the hardships I have endured were merely rehearsals to prepare me for this devastating pain.”

— Annie Ernaux

28. “Quite often I would write down on a sheet of paper the date, the time, and “he’s going to come,” along with other sentences, fears – that he might not come, that he might not feel the same desire for me.”

— Annie Ernaux

29. “One afternoon when he was there, I burned the living-room carpet down to the weft by placing a boiling coffee pot on top of it. I didn’t care. Quite the contrary. I was happy every time I caught sight of the mark as I remembered that afternoon with him. I.”

— Annie Ernaux

30. “Thousands of girls have climbed up stairs and knocked on a door answered by a woman who is a complete stranger, to whom they are about to entrust their stomach and womb. And that woman, the only person who can rid them of their misfortune, would open the door, in an apron and patterned slippers, clutching a dish towel, and inquire, “yes, miss, can i help you?”

— Annie Ernaux

31. “Organization, the watchword of women everywhere, magazines overflowing with advice, save time, do this, that and the other... but it’s really a method of sticking yourself with the most work possible in the least amount of time without pain or suffering because that would bother those around you.”

— Annie Ernaux

32. “To convey my predicament, I never resorted to descriptive terms or expressions such as “I’m expecting,” “pregnant” or “pregnancy.” They endorsed a future event that would never materialize. There was no point naming something that I was planning to get rid of. In my diary I would write, “it” or “that thing,” only once “pregnant.”

— Annie Ernaux

33. “Nothing equaled the bliss at the end of the day, after elbowing one’s way with the first passengers into the crowded RER, and inching as close as possible to the center aisle seats, and standing for these stations, of finally sitting down and closing one’s eyes, or doing a crossword.”

— Annie Ernaux

34. “Once I start trying out the text, once it appears before me in public characters, I shall be through with innocence.”

— Annie Ernaux

35. “How are we present in the existences of others, their memories, their ways of being, even their acts? There is a staggering imbalance between the influence those two nights with that man have had upon my life, and the nothingness of my presence in his. I do not envy him: I’m the one who is writing.”

— Annie Ernaux

36. “In opposition to the desires that made us restless, we were served the wisdom of limits: “You ask too much of life.”

— Annie Ernaux

37. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of in loving a person and saying so.”

— Annie Ernaux

38. “Yet it is that surreal, almost non-existent last visit that gives my passion its true meaning, which is precisely to be meaningless, and to have been for two years the most violent and unaccountable reality ever.”

— Annie Ernaux

39. “This can be said about shame: those who experience it feel that anything can happen to them, that the shame will never cease and that it will only be followed by more shame.”

— Annie Ernaux

40. “She has no defined self, but “selves” who pass from one book to another.”

— Annie Ernaux

41. “Throughout this period, all my thoughts and all my actions involved the repetition of history. I wanted to turn the present back into the past, opening on to happiness.”

— Annie Ernaux

42. “I have searched for my mother’s love in all the corners of the world.”

— Annie Ernaux

43. “With so much misery around, fighting for social advancement had lost all meaning.”

— Annie Ernaux

44. “The strangest thing about jealousy is that it can populate an entire city, the whole world, with a person you have never met.”

— Annie Ernaux

45. “The profusion of things concealed the scarcity of ideas and the erosion of beliefs.”

— Annie Ernaux

46. “The girl in the picture is a stranger who imparted her memory to me.”

— Annie Ernaux

47. “As I bend forward to check the safety catch of my mother’s wheelchair, she leans over and kisses my hair. How can I survive that kiss, such love, my mother, my mother.”

— Annie Ernaux

48. “With the Walkman, for the first time music entered the body. We could live inside music, walled off from the world.”

— Annie Ernaux

49. “I shall never hear the sound of her voice again. It was her voice, together with her words, her hands, and her way of moving and laughing, which linked the woman I am to the child I once was. The last bond between me and the world I come from has been severed.”

— Annie Ernaux

50. “I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world.”

— Annie Ernaux