Top 60 Philippe Besson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “This is important: he sees me in a certain way, a way he will never deviate from. In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become.”

— Philippe Besson

2. “I don’t know then that one day I won’t be seventeen. I don’t know that youth doesn’t last, that it’s only a moment, and then it disappears and by the time you finally realize it, it’s too late. It’s finished, vanished, lost. There are some around me who can sense it; the adults repeat it constantly but I don’t listen. Their words roll over me but don’t stick. Like water off the feathers of a duck’s back. I’m an idiot. An easygoing idiot.”

— Philippe Besson

3. “Because you will leave and we will stay.”

— Philippe Besson

4. “Nothing touches me more than cracks in the armor and the person who reveals them.”

— Philippe Besson

5. “I am an exemplary student, one who never misses a class, who almost always gets the best grades, who is the pride of his teachers.”

— Philippe Besson

6. “Have you noticed how the most beautiful landscapes lose their brilliance as soon as our thoughts prevent us from seeing them properly?”

— Philippe Besson

7. “I just wanted to write to tell you that I have been happy during these months together, that I have never been so happy, and that I already know I will never be so happy again.”

— Philippe Besson

8. “But we’re left stunted, compromised, by the burden of having to always lie and censor ourselves.”

— Philippe Besson

9. “In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become.”

— Philippe Besson

10. “I should be able to stay in this state of ecstasy. Or astonishment. Or let myself be overwhelmed by the incomprehensibility of it all. But the feeling that prevails the moment he disappears is that of being abandoned. Perhaps because it is already a familiar feeling.”

— Philippe Besson

11. “He smiled so that I could take his smile with me.”

— Philippe Besson

12. “I sense the ambition and ease of a generation that has grown up on a much smaller planet. Those who consider travel an ordinary adventure rather than a grand expedition, for whom a quiet life is considered a slow death. I see this child of the world and can’t help but think how fate probably would have played out differently had his father been driven by the same curiosity. If he had not lived in another day. If he had known how to free himself.”

— Philippe Besson

13. “I want to experience only the moment, not the looming certainty that I will lose that moment, not the certain awareness that, ultimately, this moment must slip from present to past, only the joy of the moment and the graze of memory.”

— Philippe Besson

14. “He groans, no longer able to contain it, a sound that he releases maybe without even realizing it himself; he moves me tremendously. As I’ve said, nothing in life moves me more than these moments of pure abandon, of self-oblivion.”

— Philippe Besson

15. “I had the time to think all the way home about how affairs of the body are so much more preferable to affairs of the heart, but that sometimes you don’t have the choice.”

— Philippe Besson

16. “Always we desire too much or not enough and we compensate accordingly.”

— Philippe Besson

17. “I think I love him for this loneliness, that it’s what pushed me toward him. I love his aloofness, his disengagement with the outside world. Such singularity moves me.”

— Philippe Besson

18. “Today, when I meet children on this beach, when I see them running in the dunes, or lying on the hot stone wall that was once a levee, I remember that I was like them once, with their incredible lightness and insouciance, soaking in the sun. You can never really let go of your childhood. Especially when it was happy.”

— Philippe Besson

19. “The reunions are always joyous and the good byes bittersweet, everyone regretting they have so little time together. Thomas says that he doesn’t know Vilalba very well because they usually just stay at the house for endless conversations, punctuated by laughter and complaints, long lunches and drawn-out dinners. He says that for him Spain is just people in his family who love one another, who eat and drink and cut each other off in conversation until night falls.”

— Philippe Besson

20. “Those who have not taken this step, who have not come to terms with themselves, are not necessarily frightened, they are perhaps helpless, disoriented, lost as one is in the middle of a forest that’s too dark or dense or vast.”

— Philippe Besson

21. “Today, I’d like to slap this seventeen-years old kid, not because of the grades but because of his incessant need to please those who would judge him.”

— Philippe Besson

22. “It’s the most simple words that destroy us.”

— Philippe Besson

23. “Without the war, without this magnificent summer, this absence of men, would we ever have met?”

— Philippe Besson

24. “This feeling of love, it transports me, it makes me happy. At the same time, it consumes me and makes me miserable, the way all impossible loves are miserable.”

— Philippe Besson

25. “It was love, of course. And tomorrow, there will be a great emptiness. But we could not continue – you have your life waiting for you, and I will never change. I just wanted to write to tell you that I have been happy during these months together, that I have never been so happy, and that I already know I will never be so happy again.”

— Philippe Besson

26. “Whereas for him there’s a barrier, an impenetrable wall, forbidding him to deviate from what has been predetermined. Whenever he mentions this question of the forbidden I will try in vain to show him that he’s wrong.”

— Philippe Besson

27. “Desire does not go out like a match, it extinguishes slowly as it burns into ash.”

— Philippe Besson

28. “In any case, I like to repeat his name to myself in secret. I like to write it on scraps of paper. I am stupidly sentimental: that hasn’t changed much.”

— Philippe Besson

29. “I smile when he tells me the story. It’s also the first time I’ve smiled at him. He smiles back at me. It seems as intimate to me, as magnetic, as skin against skin.”

— Philippe Besson

30. “Je reviens sur la piste, je danse encore, j’oublie mon corps, j’oublie la honte.”

— Philippe Besson

31. “And then over time, it dissipates, and fades, dispersing like pollen in the air at the return of spring. Lucas whispers: You get used to everything, even the defection of those you thought you were bound to forever.”

— Philippe Besson

32. “He goes back to the books – this crazy number of books in the house neatly lined up or stacked in piles. All of a sudden I see a sort of admiration return to his face, but it’s a painful admiration; what he likes about me is also what keeps me separate from him.”

— Philippe Besson

33. “He says: It’s a letter that was written a long time ago but never sent. It’s addressed to you. It starts with your first name. It dates from August 1984.”

— Philippe Besson

34. “Of course I “prefer boys.” But I’m not capable of saying this sentence out loud yet. I discovered my orientation very young, at eleven years old. Even then I knew.”

— Philippe Besson

35. “I will have to learn how to survive them, and perhaps writing is a good means of survival. A way of not forgetting the ones who have disappeared, of continuing a dialogue.”

— Philippe Besson

36. “Later I will write about this longing, the intolerable deprivation of the other. I will write about the sadness that eats away at you, making you crazy. It will become the template for my books, in spite of myself. I wonder sometimes if I have ever written of anything else. It’s as if I never recovered from it: the inaccessible other, occupying all my thoughts.”

— Philippe Besson

37. “I remember Buenos Aires, people dancing under a volcano, girls with endless legs and older women waiting for the return of their loved ones, the disappeared, a return that will never happen.”

— Philippe Besson

38. “One of my lifelong regrets is that I was not beautiful, and what is more, that I turned for love to those who could not but reject me.”

— Philippe Besson

39. “I wonder if it’s cold fathers who make the sensitive sons.”

— Philippe Besson

40. “I don’t know then that one day I won’t be seventeen. I don’t know that youth doesn’t last, that it’s only a moment, and then it disappears and by the time you finally realize it, it’s too late. It’s finished, vanished, lost.”

— Philippe Besson

41. “Living by her side was like living in a fairy tale because she had these moments of pure poetry – she invented whole worlds. He tells me that eventually she was placed in a specialized institution, that in the end his father resigned himself to it: the death of his soul. She is still there.”

— Philippe Besson

42. “I am taken aback by this excess precaution; in another context I would have found it ridiculous. But I understand the fear and panic he carries with him. I know how strong this fear is and also that it can’t only be fear of being caught. It’s a fear of himself too. A fear of what he is.”

— Philippe Besson

43. “It was actually Nadine who’d insisted that I come with her, telling me that I wasn’t social enough, that real life was not lived in books, that there was nothing wrong with a little lightness, a little carefree partying. She was right. Maybe if I’d listened to her a lot earlier, I wouldn’t have missed out on my youth.”

— Philippe Besson

44. “I say to myself: Basically, what’s new? Don’t we already spend most of our time avoiding each other? Missing each other? I smile at the double meaning – an unsightly, tragic smile, of course.”

— Philippe Besson

45. “We are alone in the world. I’ve never enjoyed the rain so much.”

— Philippe Besson

46. “He says that for me things are simple, that everything will be fine, that I will get out of it, it’s already written, that there’s nothing to worry about, the world will greet me with open arms. Whereas for him there’s a barrier, an impenetrable wall, forbidding him to deviate from what has been predetermined.”

— Philippe Besson

47. “He’s surprised: But how do you know it? I say: It’s on the way to Santiago de Compostela. He asks if I’ve never been there. I tell him no, never, but I read about it in a book and remembered it. He makes fun of me, saying: I was sure you were a boy like that, one who knows things just because you read it in a book. He then becomes despondent and adds: But what’s worse is that if someone asked both of us, I’m pretty sure you would be able to talk about it way better than I could.”

— Philippe Besson

48. “Later I will do the same with death. I will behave as if life will just continue. I will talk to a friend the day before he dies, imagining the future, even when he is emaciated, intubated, clearly on his deathbed. When I hear of his passing, it will always be a surprise to me.”

— Philippe Besson

49. “While the credits roll he says: That scene with the chain saw was great, wasn’t it? I look at him and joke: Yeah, I almost grabbed you at that moment. He smiles back at me and I receive his smile like a gift. There weren’t many times Thomas smiled at me like that. It wasn’t his way.”

— Philippe Besson

50. “He tells me something I did not know: that I will leave.”

— Philippe Besson