25 Quotes by Julia Kristeva

To be of no account to others. No one listens to you.

But by the way, who is the murderer? The one who does not know my relatives, or myself, as I erect my new life like a fragile mausoleum where their shadowy figure is integrated, like a corpse, at the source of my wandering?

The sadness that overwhelms us, the retardation that paralyzes us, are also a shield – sometimes the last one – against madness.

The phobic has no other object than the abject. But that word, “fear”- a fluid haze an elusive clamminess- no sooner has it cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer. Thus, fear having been bracketed, discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject.

And nevertheless, no, I have nothing to say to them, to my parents. Nothing. Nothing and everything, as always. If I tried – out of boldness, through luck, or in distress – to share with them some of the violence that causes me to be so totally on my own, they would not know where I am, who I am, what it is, in others, that rubs me the wrong way.

We found so much to say, to share, to learn... For it wasn’t just the Marquis de Sade profile and the sporty thighs-and-calves that seduced me. It was even more, perhaps, or certainly just as much, the speed at which you used to read, and still do.

The foreigner’s friends, aside from bleeding hearts who feel obliged to do good, could only be those who feel foreign to themselves.