Patrick Modiano Quotes

I AM NOTHING.Nothing but a pale shape.

When you are young , you neglect certain details that might become precious later.

His speech is hesitant because he is used to crossing out his words. It is true that after several redrafts, his style may be crystal clear. But when he takes the floor, he no longer has any means at his disposal to correct his stumbling speech.

But topographical details have a strange effect on me : instead of clarifying and sharpening images from past , they give me a harrowing sensation of emptiness and severed relationships.

Why, one wonders, does lightning strike in one place rather than another?

A novelist has more talent for written than oral assignments.

Has a biographer the right to suppress certain details under the pretext that he considers them superfluous? Or do they all have their importance, and must he present them one after the other, impartially, so that not a single one is left out, as in the inventory of a distraint? Unless the line of life, once it has reached its term, purges itself of all its useless and decorative elements. In which case, all that remains is the essential: the blanks, the silences and the pauses.

We passed the Gardens and turned down Avenue de New York. There, under the embankment trees,I had the unpleasant sensation that I was dreaming.I had already lived my life and was just a ghost hovering in the tepid air of Saturday evening. Why try to renew ties which had been broken and look for paths that had been blocked off long ago? And the plump, moustachioed little man, walking beside me, hardly seemed real.

She committed suicide...
"Why?"
"She often told me, she was frightened of getting old."

Certain coincidences risk passing unnoticed; certain people have appeared in our lives on several occasions without our realizing it.

Children are liable to expect more from life than their parents, and faced with adversity their reaction is more violent. They go farther, much farther than their parents, and, thereafter, their parents are unable to protect them.

Then again, the term “Jew” meant nothing to the fourteen-year-old Dora. When it came down to it, what did people understand by the term “Jew”? For himself, he never gave it a thought. He was used to being put into this or that category by the authorities. Unskilled labourer. Ex –Austrian. French legionnaire. Non- suspect. Ex-serviceman 100% disabled. Foreign statute labourer. Jew.

The sign had been put up out of suspicion and a guilty conscience: “Military zone. Filming or photography prohibited".

And that these directories and yearbooks constituted the most valuable and moving library you could imagine, as their pages listed people, things, vanished worlds , to which they alone bore witness.

Perhaps it was one of those mild, sunny winter days when you have a feeling of holiday and eternity- the illusion that passage of time is suspended, and that you need only slip through this breach to escape the trap which is closing around you.