Top 100 Deborah Levy Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Empathy is more painful than medusa stings.”

— Deborah Levy

52. “We have to mourn our dead, but we cannot let them take over our life.”

— Deborah Levy

53. “I was also searching for a house in which I could live and work and make a world at my own pace, but even in my imagination this home was blurred, undefined, not real, or not realistic, or lacked realism.”

— Deborah Levy

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

— Deborah Levy

55. “Afterwards, I will have to tie the trees to bamboo poles so the wind will not determine their shape. A tree cannot be given form by the vagaries of the wind.”

— Deborah Levy

56. “We have travelled a long distance from the cow with a bucket of raw milk under its udder. We are a long way from home.’ This.”

— Deborah Levy

57. “Smoking cheap Spanish filthy sock-tobacco under a pine tree was so much better than trying to hold it together on escalators. There was something comforting about being literally lost when I was lost in every other way...”

— Deborah Levy

58. “We did not yet entirely understand that Mother, as imagined and politicized by the Societal System, was a delusion. The world loved the delusion more than it loved the mother.”

— Deborah Levy

59. “She had no God to plead to for mercy or luck. It would be true to say she depended instead on human kindness and painkillers.”

— Deborah Levy

60. “She is dark. He is fair. She comes from there. He comes from here. They like each other. It is an easy and lovely lust...”

— Deborah Levy

61. “The fact that lipstick and mascara and eye shadow were called ‘Make Up’ thrilled me. Everywhere in the world there were made up people and most of them were women.”

— Deborah Levy

62. “A life without swimming every day was not a life I wanted.”

— Deborah Levy

63. “Anything covered is always interesting. There is never nothing beneath something that is covered.”

— Deborah Levy

64. “We were doing everything we could to avoid the moment we would both go our separate ways.”

— Deborah Levy

65. “Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure the heart.”

— Deborah Levy

66. “Mother was The Woman the whole world had imagined to death. It proved very hard to re-negotiate the world’s nostalgic phantasy about our purpose in life... we did not yet entirely understand that Mother, as imagined and politicized by the societal system, was a delusion.”

— Deborah Levy

67. “To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be.”

— Deborah Levy

68. “I wanted to die of shame but everyone insisted on keeping me alive. I had to live.”

— Deborah Levy

69. “The moody politics of the moderns home had become complicated and confusing. There were many modern and apparently powerful women I knew who had made a home for everyone else, but did not feel at home in their family home.”

— Deborah Levy

70. “In fact I would be content to live in a humble wooden cabin on the edge of an ocean or a lake, but somehow I looked down on myself for not having a bigger dream.”

— Deborah Levy

71. “Rose rested her pink eyes on my eyes. I removed my gaze like a traitor.”

— Deborah Levy

72. “It was true that I had no idea how to endure being alive and everything that comes with it.”

— Deborah Levy

73. “Bengali philosopher, poet and composer Rabindranath Tagore: It is very simple to be happy, but it is very difficult to be simple.”

— Deborah Levy

74. “A female writer cannot afford to feel her life too clearly. If she does, she will write in a rage when she should write calmly.”

— Deborah Levy

75. “Sometimes, I find myself limping. It’s as if my body remembers the way I walk with my mother. Memory is not always reliable. It is not the whole truth. Even I know that.”

— Deborah Levy

76. “My mother’s words are my mirror. My laptop is my veil of shame. I hide in it all the time.”

— Deborah Levy

77. “It occurred to me that both Maria and I were on the run in the twenty-first century, just like George Sand whose name was also Amantine was on the run in the nineteenth century, and Maria whose name was also Zama was looking for somewhere to recover and rest in the twentieth. We were on the run from the lies concealed in the language of politics from myths about our character and our purpose in life. We were on the run from our own desires too probably, whatever they were.”

— Deborah Levy

78. “If I see myself as an unwilling detective with a desire for justice, does that make her illness an unsolved crime? If so, who is the villain and who is the victim? Attempting to decipher her aches and pains, their triggers.”

— Deborah Levy

79. “Now that we were mothers we were all shadows of our former selves, chased by the women we used to be before we had children.”

— Deborah Levy

80. “She was not ready to go home and start imitating someone she used to be.”

— Deborah Levy

81. “I had broken the rules of exchange. She had given and I had taken, but I had not reciprocated. A gift like love is never free.”

— Deborah Levy

82. “I realized my mother had charm and verve. If I blew on her name, ROSE, the letters would shuffle around and come out as EROS, the god of love, winged but lame.”

— Deborah Levy

83. “You have becomes used to administering your mother’s medication. So perhaps it is as if you are coming off medication, too? You are using your mother like a shield to protect yourself from making a life. Medication is a ritual which I have now erased from both your lives. Attention! You will have to invent another one.”

— Deborah Levy

84. “Kitty stared at the sky smashing against the mountains.”

— Deborah Levy

85. “He doesn’t care about his own life so he doesn’t care about the lives of others.”

— Deborah Levy

86. “We Germans invented all the big movements of the twentieth century. Phenomenology from Heidegger and Hegel, communism from Marx and Engels. So you will have to excuse us for being a little stiff in our limbs – we have been busy.”

— Deborah Levy

87. “That night, in the deep heat of Greece, devoured by mosquitoes and reminiscences, I was thinking about all the doors I had closed in my life and what it would have taken to keep them ajar.”

— Deborah Levy

88. “It was hard to accept that the first man in my life would do things that were to my disadvantage if they were to his advantage. Yet it was a revelation that somehow set me free.”

— Deborah Levy

89. “She wanted to escape from a reality that was so rational it was a little bit mad.”

— Deborah Levy

90. “I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalysed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it.”

— Deborah Levy

91. “The story in this book was about a woman who has gifted her life to a man. This is not something to be tried at home but it is usually where it happens.”

— Deborah Levy

92. “Julieta looks at me, and then she laughs. ‘Your boundaries are made from sand, Sofia.’ ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I know that.”

— Deborah Levy

93. “It was not that easy to convey to him, a man much older than she was, that the world was her world too.”

— Deborah Levy

94. “I felt at ease with myself, which must have meant that she did not regard me as strange and so I had no reason to imitate someone who was less strange and had been saved from doing the chameleon thing.”

— Deborah Levy

95. “The face beneath the mask has to grow seamlessly into the mask.”

— Deborah Levy

96. “He glanced drowsily at Laura and Mitchell eating their strawberries in the sunshine and found himself about to fall asleep. It was an odd sensation, ‘to find himself’ about to fall into sleep. As if he could find himself anywhere at any time.”

— Deborah Levy

97. “He did not ask me one single question, not even my name. It seemed that what he needed was a devoted, enchanting woman at his side to acquire his canapes for him and who understood that he was entirely the subject.”

— Deborah Levy

98. “I thought so. Anything covered is always interesting. There is never nothing beneath something that is covered. As a child, I used to cover my face with my hands so that no one would know I was there. And then I discovered that covering my face made me more visible because everyone was curious to see what it was I wanted to hide in the first place.”

— Deborah Levy

99. “The scale of her belly and breasts was not unlike early fertility goddesses found in Greece around 6000 BC, except they did not wear polka-dot aprons. Did they suffer from hypochondria? Hysteria? Were they bold? Lame? Too full of the milk of human kindness?”

— Deborah Levy

100. “That was the old composition and I had walked out of that world. I had literally walked off the stage.”

— Deborah Levy