Top 100 Deborah Levy Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Be sure to enjoy language, experiment with ways of talking, be exuberant even when you don’t feel like it because language can make your world a better place to live.”

— Deborah Levy

2. “Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.”

— Deborah Levy

3. “To separate from love is to live a risk-free life. What’s the point of that sort of life? As I wheeled my electric bike through the park on the way to my writing shed, my hands had turned blue from the cold. I had given up wearing gloves because I was always grappling in the dark for keys. I stopped by the fountain, only to find it had been switched off. A sign from the council read, This fountain has been winterized. I reckoned that is what had happened to me too.”

— Deborah Levy

4. “I will never stop grieving for my long-held wish for enduring love that does not reduce its major players to something less than they are.”

— Deborah Levy

5. “Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely. But you tried and you did not get home safely. You did not get home at all.”

— Deborah Levy

6. “I confess that I am often lost in all the dimensions of time, that the past sometimes feels nearer than the present and I often fear the future has already happened.”

— Deborah Levy

7. “She was not a poet. She was a poem.”

— Deborah Levy

8. “After Duras wrote Lol Stein, she made a curious remark – she said that she gave herself permission to speak ‘in a sense totally alien to women’. I know what she means. It is so hard to claim our desires and so much more relaxing to mock them.”

— Deborah Levy

9. “I wanted my whole life so far to slip away with the rolling waves, to begin a different kind of life. But I didn’t know what that meant or how to get to it.”

— Deborah Levy

10. “It seemed that acquiring a house was not the same thing as acquiring a home. And connected to home was a question I swatted away every time it landed too near me. Who else was living with me in the grand old house with the pomegranate tree? Was I alone with the melancholy fountain for company? No. There was definitely someone else there with me, perhaps even cooling their feet in that fountain. Who was this person? A phantom.”

— Deborah Levy

11. “To unfold any number of ideas through all the dimensions of time is the great adventure of the writing life. But I had nowhere to write.”

— Deborah Levy

12. “You are history.”

— Deborah Levy

13. “I have been waiting on her all my life. I was the waitress. Waiting on her and waiting for her. What was I waiting for? Waiting for her to step into her self or step out of her invalid self. Waiting for her to take the voyage out of her gloom, to buy a ticket to a vital life.”

— Deborah Levy

14. “I wasn’t sure my skeletal system had found a way of walking freely in the Societal System.”

— Deborah Levy

15. “I might one day risk falling in love again, but I was not going to lose my heart to the cardiologist.”

— Deborah Levy

16. “My love for my mother is like an axe. It cuts very deep.”

— Deborah Levy

17. “When happiness is happening it feels as if nothing else happened before it, it is a sensation that happens only in the present tense.”

— Deborah Levy

18. “Sometimes we want to unbelong as much as we want to belong.”

— Deborah Levy

19. “It smelt of coconut ice cream and sweat and the Mediterranean sea. I.”

— Deborah Levy

20. “Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realize we don’t want to hold it together.”

— Deborah Levy

21. “It is so mysterious to want to suppress women. It is even more mysterious when women want to suppress women. I can only think we are so very powerful that we need to be suppressed all the time.”

— Deborah Levy

22. “I have always wanted to go to Trieste because it sounds like tristesse, which is a light-hearted word, even though in French it means sadness. In Spanish it is tristeza, which is heavier than French sadness, more of a groan than a whisper.”

— Deborah Levy

23. “I have never got a grip on when the past begins or where it ends, but if cities map the past with statues made from bronze forever frozen in one dignified position, as much as I try to make the past keep still and mind its manners, it moves and murmurs with me through every day.”

— Deborah Levy

24. “It is not enough to feel love. More important is how we express love.”

— Deborah Levy

25. “The truth was her husband had the final word because he wrote words and then he put full stops at the end of them. She knew this, but what did his wife know?”

— Deborah Levy

26. “I pursue my case, Monsieur, I speak English, Italian and German, and I want justice in all three languages. I have been damaged by unlove. It makes at inappropriate moments when I should be dignified.”

— Deborah Levy

27. “It is a disappointment to me to spawn a child who feels so deeply. I would like to refute the idea that to feel somehow makes you a better person.”

— Deborah Levy

28. “The house with the pomegranate tree was my major acquisition. In this sense, I owned some unreal estate. The odd thing was that every time I tried to see myself inside this grand old house, I felt sad. It was as if the search for home was the point, and now that I had acquired it and the chase was over, there were no more branches to put in the fire.”

— Deborah Levy

29. “What is a sigh? That would be another good subject for a field study. Is it just a long, deep, audible exhalation of breath? Rose’s sigh was intense but not subdued. It was frustrated but not yet sad. A sigh resets the respiratory system so it was possible that my mother had been holding her breath, which suggests she was more nervous than she appeared to be. A sigh is an emotional response to being set a difficult task.”

— Deborah Levy

30. “What is worse? To be chained all day with a bowl of water, or to be free and die of thirst?”

— Deborah Levy

31. “I have researched aboriginal culture, Mayan hieroglyphics and the corporate culture of a Japanese car manufacturer, and I have written essays on the internal logic of various other societies, but I haven’t a clue about my own logic.”

— Deborah Levy

32. “I wasn’t in the mood to talk. The mournful sound of the rubber wheels of the tea trolley squeaking on the lino floor was the right soundtrack for the end of the world. Sometimes the tea lady lost her grip and the trolley hit the corners of the walls and beds. It was the equivalent of waterfalls and parrots in my new terrible world.”

— Deborah Levy

33. “It was not that easy to convey to him, a man much older than she was, that the world was her world, too. He had taken a risk when he invited her to join him at his table. After all, she came with a whole life and libido of her own. It had not occurred to him that she might not consider herself to be the minor character and him the major character. In this sense, she had unsettled a boundary, collapsed a social hierarchy, broken with the usual rules.”

— Deborah Levy

34. “My problem is that I want to smoke the cigar and for someone else to light it. I want to blow out smoke. Like a volcano. Like a monster. I want to fume. I do not want to be the girl whose job it is to wail in a high-pitched voice at funerals.”

— Deborah Levy

35. “It’s hard to write and be open and let things in when life is tough, but to keep everything out means there’s nothing to work with.”

— Deborah Levy

36. “It was impossible to believe that someone did not want to be saved from their incoherence.”

— Deborah Levy

37. “In the new quiet I heard the sea as if my ears were laid against the ocean floor. I could hear everything. The rumbling earthquake of a ship and spider crabs moving between weeds.”

— Deborah Levy

38. “As Simone de Beauvoir had told us, women are not supposed to eclipse men in a world in which success and power are marked out for them. It is not easy to take up the historic privilege of dominance over women... if he is economically dependent on her talents. At the same time, she receives the fatal message that she must conceal her talents and abilities in order to be loved by him.”

— Deborah Levy

39. “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.”

— Deborah Levy

40. “She knew she never wanted children or to serve his breakfast or run his errands or pretend she was not intellectually engaged with the world to make herself more loveable to him.”

— Deborah Levy

41. “Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely.”

— Deborah Levy

42. “I had lost my job. I was no longer officially a minor historian. Perhaps I was history itself, flailing around in a number of directions, sometimes all of them at the same time.”

— Deborah Levy

43. “Couples were always keen to return to the task of trying to destroy their lifelong partners while pretending to have their best interests at heart.”

— Deborah Levy

44. “When our father does the things he needs to do in the world, we understand it is his due. If our mother does the things she needs to do in the world, we feel she has abandoned us. It is a miracle she survives our mixed messages, written in society’s most poisoned ink. It is enough to drive her mad.”

— Deborah Levy

45. “I was flesh thirst desire dust blood lips cracking feet blistered knees skinned hips bruised, but I was so happy not to be napping on a sofa under a blanket with an older man by my side and a baby on my lap.”

— Deborah Levy

46. “I am not okay. Not at all and haven’t been for some time. I did not tell her how discouraged I felt and that I was ashamed I was not more resilient and all the rest of it which included wanting a bigger life but that so far I had not been bold enough to make a bid for things I wanted to happen and I feared it was written in the stars that I might end up with a reduced life like hers...”

— Deborah Levy

47. “The unloved watch the loved perform the small rituals of their loving.”

— Deborah Levy

48. “Empathy is more painful than medusa stings.”

— Deborah Levy

49. “I had energy because I had no choice but to have energy. I had to write to support my children and I had to do all the heavy lifting. Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.”

— Deborah Levy

50. “It would take a while for me not to think of the Greek language as the father who walked out on me.”

— Deborah Levy