Top 50 Patrick Modiano Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A man without scenery is completely disarmed.”

— Patrick Modiano

2. “But I am a patient man. I can wait for hours in the rain.”

— Patrick Modiano

3. “When you really love someone, you must accept their part of mystery. And that’s why you love them.”

— Patrick Modiano

4. “In the end, we forget the details of our lives that embarrass us or are too painful. We just lie back and allow ourselves to float along calmly over the deep waters, with our eyes closed.”

— Patrick Modiano

5. “For a long time – and this particular time with greater force than usual – summer has been a season that gives me a sense of emptiness and absence, and takes me back to the past.”

— Patrick Modiano

6. “Dicen que los lugares conservan por lo menos cierta huella de las personas que los han habitado.”

— Patrick Modiano

7. “The doctor used to tell me that every person about to die becomes a music box playing the melody that best describes his life, his character, and his hopes. For some, it’s a popular waltz; for others, a march.”

— Patrick Modiano

8. “A little girl is returning from the beach, at dusk, with her mother. She is crying for no reason at all, because she would have liked to continue playing. She moves off into the distance. She has already turned the corner of the street, and do not our lives dissolve into the evening as quickly as this grief of childhood?”

— Patrick Modiano

9. “And yet, from time to time, beneath this thick layer of amnesia, you can certainly sense something, an echo, distant, muted, but of what, precisely, it is impossible to say. Like finding yourself on the edge of a magnetic field, with no pendulum to pick up the radiation.”

— Patrick Modiano

10. “In writing this book, I send out signals, like a lighthouse beacon in whose power to illuminate the darkness, alas, I have no faith. But I live in hope.”

— Patrick Modiano

11. “Nice is a city of ghosts and specters, but I hope not to become one of them right away.”

— Patrick Modiano

12. “The more obscure and mysterious things remained, the more interested I became in them. I even looked for mystery where there was none.”

— Patrick Modiano

13. “Life is completely different when you live near a railway station. It feels as if you’re just passing through. Everything is temporary. One day or another, you’ll hop on a train.”

— Patrick Modiano

14. “Then she lowered her arm and the gate closed behind her. That arm suddenly falling and the metallic clank of the gate shutting made me understand that from one moment to another one can lose heart.”

— Patrick Modiano

15. “Perhaps it was one of those mild, sunny winter days when you have a feeling of holiday and eternity-the illusory feeling that the course of time is suspended, and that you need only slip through this breach to escape the trap that is closing around you.”

— Patrick Modiano

16. “On winning Literature Nobel Prize: I was actually in the street. Yes, I was in the street. It was my daughter who notified me.”

— Patrick Modiano

17. “You were right to tell me that in life it is not the future which counts, but the past.”

— Patrick Modiano

18. “I just have two daughters and a grandson. So not a big family.”

— Patrick Modiano

19. “One should never expect anyone to reply to one’s questions.”

— Patrick Modiano

20. “After all, the war doesn’t alter my relationship with a blade of grass.”

— Patrick Modiano

21. “Lots of people perish on the highways. All those faces should be preserved, engagements kept, promises upheld. Impossible. I walked out instantly. Fleeing the scene of a crime. That kind of game can destroy you. Anyway, I’ve never known who I was. I authorize my biographer to simply call me “a man,” and I wish him luck. I’ve been unable to lengthen my stride, my breath, or my sentences. He won’t understand the first thing about this story. Neither do I. We’re even.”

— Patrick Modiano

22. “Why do people whose existence you are unaware of, whom you meet once and will never see again, come to play, behind the scenes, an important role in your life?”

— Patrick Modiano

23. “On winter mornings when it’s dark and the air is crisp, the lights are still shining and the first customers are gathered at the counter like conspirators. They give you the illusion that the day will be a new adventure. And that illusion stats with you for at least some of the morning.”

— Patrick Modiano

24. “That is her secret. A poor and precious secret that not even the executioners, the decrees, the occupying authorities, the Depot, the barracks, the camps, History, time-everything that defiles and destroys you-have been able to take away from her.”

— Patrick Modiano

25. “Someone had told him one day that you forget the voices of those whom you have been close to in the past very quickly.”

— Patrick Modiano

26. “For me the autumn has never been a sad season. The dead leaves and the increasingly shorter days have never suggested the end of anything, but rather an expectation of the future. In paris, there is an electricity in the air in october evenings at nightfall. Even when it is raining. i do not feel low at that hour of the day, nor do i have the sense of time flying by. i have the impression that everything is possible. the year begins in the month of october.”

— Patrick Modiano

27. “She had the right idea, old man, don’t you think – to disappear before it gets too late?”

— Patrick Modiano

28. “He had written this book only in the hope that she might get in touch with him. Writing a book, for him, was also a way of beaming a searchlight or sending out coded signals to certain people with whom he had lost touch. It was enough to scatter their names at random through the pages and wait until they finally produced news of themselves.”

— Patrick Modiano

29. “In big cities, in the summertime, people of long since lost track of each other or who don’t even know each other meet one evening on the terrace, and lose each other again. And none of it really matters.”

— Patrick Modiano

30. “What a peculiar path I’ve had to take in order to reach you.”

— Patrick Modiano

31. “And then the next fifteen years fell apart: a few blurry faces, a few vague memories, ashes...”

— Patrick Modiano

32. “Unless the line of a life, once it has reached its term, purges itself of all its useless and decorative elements. In which case, all that remains is the essential: the blanks, the silences and the pauses.”

— Patrick Modiano

33. “Strange people. The kind that leave the merest blur behind them, soon vanished. Hutte and I often used to talk about these traceless beings. They spring up out of nothing one fine day and return there, having sparkled a little. Beauty queens. Gigolos. Butterflies. Most of them, even when alive, had no more substance than steam which will never condense.”

— Patrick Modiano

34. “I was happy when I walked the streets of Paris by myself.”

— Patrick Modiano

35. “We discover, often too late to talk to him about it, an episode from his life that a loved one has concealed from you. Has he really hidden it from you? He has forgotten, or more likely, over time, he no longer thinks about it. Or, quite simply, he can’t find the words.”

— Patrick Modiano

36. “Finally, the horizon stretched out infinitely before me and I felt utterly content looking at stars from afar and trying to make out all the variable, temporary, extinguished or faded stars. I was nothing in this infinity, but I could finally breathe.”

— Patrick Modiano

37. “Many years afterwards, we attempt to solve puzzles that were not mysteries at the time and we try to decipher half-obliterated letters from a language that is too old and whose alphabet we don’t even know.”

— Patrick Modiano

38. “People certainly lead compartmentalized lives and their friends do not know each other. It’s unfortunate.”

— Patrick Modiano

39. “He was seeking a lost innocence and settings made for enjoyment and ease, but where one could never be happy again.”

— Patrick Modiano

40. “On the sidewalk, dead leaves. Or burned pages from an old Gaffiot dictionary. It’s the neighborhood of colleges and convents.”

— Patrick Modiano

41. “Yes, this man had the persistence of an insect.”

— Patrick Modiano

42. “One has to retire eventually, Guy.”

— Patrick Modiano

43. “In those days, I thought I was happy.”

— Patrick Modiano

44. “One has to be aware of so-called witnesses.”

— Patrick Modiano

45. “People don’t come back any more. Haven’t you noticed that, Monsieur?”

— Patrick Modiano

46. “Circumstances and settings are no importance. One day this sense of emptiness and remorse submerges you. Then, like a tide, it ebbs and disappears. But in the end it returns in force, and she couldn’t shake it off. Nor could I.”

— Patrick Modiano

47. “In this life that sometimes seems to be a vast, ill-defined landscape without signposts, amid all of the vanishing lines and the lost horizons, we hope to find reference points, to draw up some sort of land registry so as to shake the impression that we are navigating by chance. So we forge ties, we try to find stability in chance encounters.”

— Patrick Modiano

48. “Without fully realizing it, I began writing my first book. It was neither a vocation nor a particular gift that pushed me to write, but quite simply the enigma posed by a man I had no chance of finding again, and by all those questions that would never have an answer.”

— Patrick Modiano

49. “When he was younger, he used the slightest opportunity to slip away from people, without his being able to understand very clearly why he did so: a longing to break free and to breathe in the fresh air?”

— Patrick Modiano

50. “I’m afraid that once you have all the answers, your life closes in on you like a trap, with the clank of keys in a prison cell. Wouldn’t it be better to leave empty lots around you, into which you can escape?”

— Patrick Modiano