Top 50 Jacqueline Harpman Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

2. “Perhaps you never have time when you are alone? You only acquire it by watching it go by in others”.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

3. “Is there a satisfaction in the effort of remembering that provides its own nourishment, and is what one recollects less important than the act of remembering? That is another question that will remain unanswered: I feel as though I am made of nothing else.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

4. “Sometimes, I used to sit under the sky, on a clear night, and gaze at the stars, saying, in my croaky voice: “Lord, if you’re up there somewhere, and you aren’t too busy, come and say a few words to me, because I’m very lonely and it would make me so happy.” Nothing happened. So I reckon that humanity – which I wonder whether I belong to – really had a very vivid imagination.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

5. “I thought it was unfair, and then I understood that, alone and terrified, anger was my only weapon against the horror.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

6. “I felt as if this pain would never be appeased, that it had me in its grip for ever, that it would prevent me from devoting myself to anything else, and that I was allowing it to do so. I think that is what they call being consumed with remorse.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

7. “I only know the stony plain, wandering, and the gradual loss of hope. I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct. Perhaps, somewhere humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silence. There is nothing we can do about it.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

8. “Death is sometimes so discreet that it steals in noiselessly, stays for only a moment and carries off its prey...”

— Jacqueline Harpman

9. “Talking is existing.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

10. “If you do something that is forbidden, it is the action that is the target. If you do something that isn’t forbidden, and they intervene, then it’s not the activity that’s attracting the attention, it is you yourself.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

11. “Inevitably, with memory comes pain.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

12. “But I had only known the absurd, and I think that made me profoundly different from them.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

13. “I received that caress several times – the only one I was able to tolerate – the silent gratitude of a woman receiving death at my hands. None wanted to endure pain and I think they were in a hurry to die. I don’t know how many I killed – I who count everything, that was one thing I didn’t count.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

14. “Look at them. They’re pretending, they behave as though they still have some control over their lives and make momentous decisions about which vegetable to cook first.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

15. “One after the other, they were buried under that sky and neither they nor I knew if it was the one under which we’d been born.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

16. “They bustled around chatting. It was the first time I listened closely, and I was astonished at how much they had to say, the passion with which they repeated the same thing in ten different ways so as to avoid noticing, in fact, that they had absolutely nothing to say to each other for ages, but human beings need to speak, otherwise they lose their humanity.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

17. “I have spent my whole life doing I don’t know what, but it hasn’t made me happy.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

18. “We have no future any more. All we can do is entertain ourselves by conversing.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

19. “We were caged birds longing for the freedom of the sky.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

20. “Whether it was their fault or not, they’d gone mad by force of circumstance, they’d lost their reason because nothing in their lives made sense any more.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

21. “All of a sudden, I found myself at the top. I was in what we later called a cabin, three walls and a door, also open, the plain spreading out before me. I bounded forward and looked. It was the world.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

22. “Was I the only one? Did the planet on which I was wandering have a thousand sister planets scattered across the starry sky and, at night, while I was waiting to fall asleep, and my gaze sometimes lit on some distant globe, was the same scene taking place there?”

— Jacqueline Harpman

23. “Survival is never more than putting off the moment of death.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

24. “How much of our humanity is intrinsic? How much remains, when all else is stripped away?”

— Jacqueline Harpman

25. “They often seem to feel the need to emphasise that they wrote the book not out of vanity, but because someone asked them to, and that they had thought about it long and hard before accepting. How strange! It suggests that people were not avid to learn, and that you had to apologise for wanting to convey your knowledge.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

26. “I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering and that I was human after all. I felt as if this pain would never be appeased, that it had me in its grip for ever, that it would prevent me from devoting myself to anything else, and that I was allowing it to do so. I think that that is what they call being consumed with remorse.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

27. “Sometimes the women pitied me, saying that at least they’d known real life, and I was very jealous of them, but they died, as I am about to die, and what does having lived mean once you are no longer alive?”

— Jacqueline Harpman

28. “I had in my hands the most precious of treasures, a spring from which to drink the knowledge of that world to which I would never have access.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

29. “Animula vagula blandula, each one of us, little wandering souls seeking a share of happiness and always disappointed, as we go from dawn to dawn, our hearts torn, brave and pathetic, desperately trying to behave with the dignity required by our human condition.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

30. “No life is ordinary. No life is without hope, without light, even during the unimaginable.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

31. “I reckon that humanity – which I wonder whether I belong to – really had a very vivid imagination.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

32. “It is strange that I am dying from a diseased womb, I who have never had periods, I who have never known men.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

33. “Sitting on the bench, gazing towards the setting sun, she lost her mind in the cerebral convolutions, the mysterious nooks and crannies of the memory, she had gone backwards, seeking a world that made sense, losing her way among the labyrinths, slowly deteriorating, dimming, noiselessly being obliterated and then fading away so gradually that it was impossible to pinpoint the transition between the flickering little flame and the shadows.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

34. “Something that everybody does becomes meaningless.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

35. “We came to the conclusion that they left you here because any decision can be analysed, and that their lack of decision indicated the only thing they wanted us to know, which is that we must know nothing.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

36. “Don’t we all go through life in the same ignorance of who we are, ready to rush at any description of ourselves that would give us the illusion of having a simple identity that can be summed up in a few words?”

— Jacqueline Harpman

37. “The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before reading, because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

38. “I lived in a perpetual present and I was gradually forgetting my story.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

39. “I wondered what would make me stop, whether it would be hunger, sleep or boredom – in other words, what prompts decisions when you are utterly alone.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

40. “As long as the sheets of paper covered in my handwriting lie on this table, I can become a reality in someone’s mind.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

41. “To understand the ties that attach us to each other, we only have a very limited number of models: so me to me? We approve or disapprove of ourselves, we love or hate ourselves, we do not have any more power over ourselves than over others, it is the same struggle that confronts us, victors or vanquished, with our external enemies and our inner contradictions.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

42. “Perhaps, somewhere, humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silence.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

43. “The things I have never told anyone absolutely define me and isolate me, the things that I alone know about myself guarantee my boundaries. Here, this is me, there, is everybody else, the people who do not know the things I have never confessed.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

44. “Hope can blossom even in the harshest of environments.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

45. “It wasn’t necessary for me to stop Anthea’s heart. Each death had contributed a little to killing her. There had been so much hope when we’d escaped from the prison, and then the slow dissipation, the gradual abandonment of all expectations, a defeat that had killed everything without a battle. She wondered when it had dawned on us that we were as much prisoners out in the open as we had been behind bars.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

46. “I have no idea what you mean by madness. You know I’m not like the rest of you. I haven’t experienced the things you miss so badly, or if I ever did, I don’t remember anything, and that hasn’t done me any harm. To me it feels as if I’ve always been alone, even among all of you, because I’m so different. I’ve never really understood you, I didn’t know what you were talking about.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

47. “For the first time, I understood that I was living at the very heart of despair. I had insulated myself from it, believing that it was out of bitterness, but suddenly I realised it was out of caution.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

48. “I am everything mummy didn’t want you to be. Each time you sensed her disapproval, you were afraid and you gave up, you wanted to remove whatever displeased her from yourself.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

49. “My memory begins with my anger.”

— Jacqueline Harpman

50. “The destiny of daughters burdened with an impossible mother is tragic. When they manage to develop a healthy indifference, people say they are heartless, and when they are devoted, people say they are masochists.”

— Jacqueline Harpman