7 Quotes by Nathalie Léger

Flaubert writing to Louise Colet in 1853: Everything we invent is truth, do not doubt it. Poetry is as precise as geometry. The conclusion is as good as its deduction, and, at a certain point, we no longer deceive ourselves in matters of the soul.

Someone who knew Barbara Loden well told me: 'She said it is easy to be avant-garde but it is really difficult to tell a simple story well.

... from the outside what can you see of the deepest despair?

I felt like I was managing a huge building site, from which I was going to excavate a miniature model of modernity, reduced to its simplest, most complex form: a woman telling her own story through that of another woman.

I prefer what Louis-Ferdinand Céline says: when you've reached the very end of all things, and sorrow itself no longer offers an answer, then you must return to the company of others, no matter who they are.

The hardest thing is the words, how long it takes, he says, taking a sip of his drink, the concentration you need to work out what goes with what, how to put together a single sentence. I had no idea that shaping a sentence was so difficult, all the possible ways there are to do i, even the simplest sentence, as soon as it's written down, all the hesitations, all the problems. (Mickey Mantle describing writing his memoir.)

I was reminded that only in unfamiliar bedrooms do we perceive with such clarity the true nature of our existence---true because astray---only away from our own bedroom, from the room that I longed for ever moment of my trip---how I longed to be there, to slip into it---in the persistently unyielding space of a deserted place that just won't be appropriated.