18 Quotes by Édouard Levé

You used to doubt what you had perceived, but never what others invented. You suffered real life in its continuous stream, but you controlled the flow of fictional life by reading at your own rhythm: you could stop, speed up, or slow down; go backward or jump into the future. As a reader, you had the power of a god: time submitted to you.

You were said to have died of suffering. But there was notas much sadness in you as there is now in those whoremember you. You died because you searched forhappiness at the risk of finding the void.

You did not fear death. You stepped in its path, but without really desiring it: how can one desire something one doesn’t know? You didn’t deny life but affirmed your taste for the unknown, betting that if something existed on the other side, it would be better than here.

Your life was a hypothesis. Those who die old are made of the past. Thinking of them, one thinks of what they have done. Thinking of you, one thinks of what you could have become. You were, and you will remain, made up of possibilities.

Your suicide makes the lives of those who outlive you more intense. Should they be threatened by boredom, or tshould the absurdity of their lives leap out at them from the curve of some cruel mirror, let them remember you, and the pain of existence will seem preferable to the disquietude of no longer being.

You were not surprised to find yourself ill adapted to the world, but it did surprise you that the world had produced a being who now lived in it as a foreigner. Do plants commit suicide? Do animals die of helplessness? They either function or disappear. You were perhaps a weak link, an accidental evolutionary dead end, a temporary anomaly not destined to burgeon again.

Since you seldom spoke, you were rarely wrong. You seldom spoke because you seldom went out. If you did go out, you listened and watched. Now, since you no longer speak, you will always be right. In truth, you do still speak: through those, like me, who bring you back to life, and interrogate you. We hear your responses and admire their wisdom. If the facts turned out to contradict your counsel, we blame ourselves for having misinterpreted you. Yours are the truths, ours are the errors.

Ta dernière seconde a changé ta vie aux yeux des autres.

Die Worte seien schöner, wenn man sie nur halb verstünde.