“I would shoot guns and thrust bayonets through flesh to distract me from myself; I would whip, torture, wrestle, drive racing-cars over cliffs to distract me from myself; jump from helicopters, throw hand grenades to distract me from myself; I would march right left right screaming orders in my throat, obeying orders in my throat, to distract me from myself. I would build muscles I never knew I had, to distract me from myself.”
– Deborah Levy, Beautiful Mutants, 1989: 45
“I know I’m never going to fully grasp life in my art. It’s never as good as having the sun on your face. Even if you film someone with the sun on their face it feels as if you’ve lost something.”
– Laure Prouvost, “The Sun On Your Face,” Interview by Zoe Pilger, freeze 166 (October 2014)
“Who is she, this mocking Madame Bovary, staring all day at her carpets? This Italian suburban supermodel, catwalking the white surgical aisles of hypermarkets in Frankfurt. Clasping soap powder and pâté to her beautiful breasts as if they were Oscars.”
– Deborah Levy, The Unloved
“‘There are days’, she says, ‘when I stare into the carpet. We have a lot of carpet in our house in Frankfurt because it is very big. I imported it from Rome. It is blue, the blue of the Mediterranean.’ She stops, as if to measure the effect of her words on the provincial Detective Inspctor. ‘There are days’, she repeats, ‘when I do nothing but stare into the carpet. There are places, near the television set for example, where the blue deepens and I am sucked, abducted, into its dark centre. I am an alien in my own home, floating through the hyperspace of one hundred per cent wool.'”
– Deborah Levy, The Unloved
“I realised that the question I had asked myself while writing this book [Swimming Home] was (as surgeons say) very close to the bone: ‘What do we do with knowledge that we cannot bear to live with? What do we do with the things we do not want to know?'”
– Deborah Levy, Things I don’t Want to Know
“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, Swimming Home
“He asked her again to please, please, please drive him home to his wife and daughter.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely.'”
– Deborah Levy, Swimming Home
“It was impossible to believe that someone did not want to be saved from their incoherence.”
– Deborah Levy, Swimming Home
“Just as the man who is hanging himself, after kicking away the stool on which he stood, heading for the final shore, rather than feeling the leap which he is making into the void feels only the rope which holds him, held to the end, held more than ever, bound as he had never been before to the existence he would like to leave.”
– Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure
“Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you’ve the chance.”
– Ben Lerner, 10:04
ANDREW GALLIX 