Marie Vieux-Chauvet Quotes

"...But what can you do time has rubbed away the full name as it rubs everything else. All you can do is adapt to the new and minimize the damage..." (p83)

You may be all bluster strutting about like a walking arsenal, but I'm smart enough to hide my game and look harmless to you. And therein lies my strength. I am patient, whereas you, like all fools, are impulsive. I wrap myself in the dignity of an old family line, as I nurse my serpent's venom. You spread your cruelty, I know how to hide mine. You bite, I sting-stealthily, my eye trained by a bourgeois education, imbibed like mother's milk, which makes me the most cunning of enemies. I wait for my moment. Because for now, love saves me from hatred. (p53)

...she led a dignified and modest life. But society, spiteful and querulous, always seeking sacrificial victims, never forgave her. Her parents themselves had fueled the scandal by punishing her so spectacularly, for fear people would say they weren't raising her right. (p107)

Quietly, like a shadow, I watch this drama unfold scene by scene. I am the lucid one here, the dangerous one, and nobody suspects. An old maid! No husband. Doesn't know love. Hasn't even lived, really. They're wrong. In any case, I'm savoring my revenge in silence. Silence is mine, vengeance is mine. (first lines)

She refuses to understand the march of history, its twists and reversals. (p15)

In Saint-Martin's voice she had sensed the stirrings of a different version of the same revolt Joseph had revealed to her that one night. The Whites could also suffer the injustice of the Law! She remembered Joseph explaining to her that the planters' greatest enemies were the poor whites. Discontent, hatred, and revolt thus existed on a human scale and not only within the black race, despised and enslaved? (chapter XII, p94)

In every human being there is a blessed soul made miserable by the pursuit of happiness. (p69)

Ah! These long sleepless nights when even the air you breathe resounds with a life of its own, when each hour falls on the heart like a tolling bell! How these nights have furrowed my face and aged me! (p146)

Amazing how love cancels out all other feelings. (p23)

Unfortunately, I was too practiced in the art of deception, and behind my mask of detachment, I burned in silence like a torch. (p12)

The sentences coming out of him displaced those scrolling under his eyes in the book. (chapter 8)

What a hymn to life, this work born from suffering! (p31)

"He lives in sin," my mother explained to me, "and sin is contagious." (p93)

When she came out, pure and beautiful in her immaculate smock, all that weighed on his heart seemed to melt. She exists, you simply have to remind yourself that such women exist in order to reconcile yourself with life, he told himself. (Chapter 10)

Fear is a vice that takes root once it is cultivated. It takes time to recover from it.
Jean Luze shrugged.
"Who can boast that he has never been afraid?" he shot back at Audier. "At least you have been spared from war. As for me, I bear its mark on my body and soul forever."