104 Quotes by Patrick Modiano

Many years afterwards, we attempt to solve puzzles that were not mysteries at the time and we try to decipher half-obliterated letters from a language that is too old and whose alphabet we don't even know.

No. She told me she was going to marry him, to get French nationality . . . She was obsessed with getting a nationality...

Finally, the horizon stretched out infinitely before me and I felt utterly content looking at stars from afar and trying to make out all the variable, temporary, extinguished or faded stars. I was nothing in this infinity, but I could finally breathe.

Depuis, le Paris où j'ai tenté de retrouver sa trace est demeuré aussi désert et silencieux que ce jour-là. Je marche à travers les rues vides. Pour moi, elles le restent, même le soir, à l'heure des embouteillages, quand les gens se pressent vers les bouches de métro. Je ne peux pas m'empêcher de penser à elle et de sentir un écho de sa présence dans certains quartiers.

Nice is a city of ghosts and specters, but I hope not to become one of them right away.

There are blanks in a life, but also sometimes what they call a refrain. For periods of varying length, you don’t hear this refrain, as if you’ve forgotten it.

The other day, I happened to walk through it. I had a strange sensation. Not that time had passed, but that another me, a twin, was prowling around there -- down to the smallest detail, and until the end of time -- through what I had experienced over a very short period.

Si yo no diera fe de ello, no quedaría huella de la presencia de esa desconocida y de la de mi padre en un coche celular en febrero de 1942, en los Campos elíseos. Sólo serían personas —muertas o vivas— a las que se clasifica en la categoría de “individuos no identificados

But I am a patient man. I can wait for hours in the rain.