57 Quotes by Irene Nemirovsky

No matter how hard they tried, they could never take all their memories with them: the best memories would remain here, between these thin walls.

My certainty that deep down I'm a free man. It's a constant, precious possession, and whether I keep it or lose it is up to me and no one else. I desperately want the insanity we're living through to end. I desperately want what has begun to finish. In a word, I desperately want this tragedy to be over and for us to try to survive it, that's all. What's important is to live; Primum vivere. One day at a time. To survive, to wait, to hope.

Nu limba, legile, obiceiurile sau principiile despart sau unesc ființele, ci felul identic în care țin cuțitul și furculița.

The way a man drinks in company tells you nothing about him, but the way he drinks when alone reveals, without his realizing it, the very depths of his soul.

...she cried because prejudice outlives passion and because she was sentimentally patriotic.

Believe me, my boy, women don't love a man for himself but as a weapon against other women.

But what is certain is that in five, ten or twenty years, this problem unique to our time, according to him, will no longer exist, it will be replaced by others...Yet this music, the sound of this rain on the windows, the great mournful creaking of the cedar tree in the garden outside, this moment, so tender, so strange in the middle of war, this will never change, not this, this is forever.

They're trying to make us believe we live in the age of "the community," when the individual must perish so that society may live, and we don't want to see that it is society that is dying so the tyrants can live.

Everyone was saying that Europe, civilisation, the entire world was collapsing, that the century was destined to end in catastrophe, that everything would perish, drowned in blood. But she still hoped for a husband, a home, children, and she instinctively felt that the destruction of everything was a mirage, a lie, while she, she lived the truth.