Relationships and Family

In Africa, when an old man dies, it is a library burning.

Soon the birds and ancients

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom.

Twenty love-sick maidens we, Love-sick all against our will.

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.

While one can do nothing about choosing one’s relatives, one can, as artist, choose one’s “ancestors.”

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Mama, take this badge off of me

[ Replying to anti-Semitic taunting in the House of Commons :] Yes, I am a Jew! When the ancestors of the honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple!

How do you know that love is gone? If you said that you would be there at seven, you get there by nine and he or she has not called the police yet—it’s gone.

[ Remarks at debate, University of Stockholm, 1957 :] I have always denounced terrorism. I must also denounce a terrorism which is exercised blindly, in the streets of Algiers for example, and which some day could strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice, but I shall defend my mother above justice.

Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier . Mother died today, or maybe it was yesterday. L’Étranger (The Stranger) pt. 1, ch. 1 (1942)

My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for His creature: of whom I had made an idol.

[ Of the Black Death :] How many valiant men, how many fair ladies, breakfast with their kinfolk and the same night supped with their ancestors in the next world!

France, mother of arts, of warfare, and of laws.

Your sister is crossed in love, I find. I congratulate her. Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed in love a little now and then.

What do girls do who haven’t any mothers to help them through their troubles?

Ah, love, let us be true / To one another! for the world, which seems / To lie before us like a land of dreams, / So various, so beautiful, so new, / Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.

Never praise a sister to a sister, in the hope of your compliments reaching the proper ears.

As generations come and go, / Their arts, their customs, ebb and flow; / Fate, fortune, sweep strong powers away, / And feeble, of themselves, decay.

There’s so much horseshit about babies; schools change every ten years. [My sister] raised a couple of nice ones by forcing them to be considerate or leave the room.... I think people act the way they’re expected to act.

Every tradition grows continually more venerable, and the more remote its origin, the more this is lost sight of. The veneration paid the tradition accumulates from generation to generation, until it at last becomes holy and excites awe.

Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime.