Patrick Modiano Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

What makes us decide to run away? I remember my own flight on 18 January 1960….. A calm ordinary winter, not to be compared with that eighteen years earlier. But it seems that the sudden urge to escape may be prompted by one of those cold, grey days which makes you more than ever aware of your solitude, intensifying your feeling that a trap is about to close.

Patrick Modiano
You should never marry a lot younger than you... never.... it never works... there is not a single case of its working..

Patrick Modiano
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.

Patrick Modiano
Fredo Lampe. Am Rande Der Nacht. For me, name and title evoked those lighted windows from which you cannot tear your gaze. You are convinced that, behind them, somebody whom you have forgotten has been awaiting your return for years, or else that there is no longer anybody there. Only a lamp, left burning in the empty room.

Patrick Modiano
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.

Patrick Modiano
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.

Patrick Modiano
With the passing of the years, each neighbourhood, each street in a city evokes a memory, a meeting, a regret, a moment of happiness for those who were born there and have lived there. Often the same street is tied up with successive memories, to the extent that the topography of a city becomes your whole life, called to mind in successive layers as if you could decipher the writings superimposed on a palimpsest. And also the lives of the thousands upon thousands of other, unknown, people passing by on the street or in the Métro passageways at rush hour.

Patrick Modiano
This feeling of not belonging to the same sensation which grips you in a dream, you find yourself walking through an unfamiliar district. On waking you realize, little by little, that the pattern of its streets had overlaid with the one with which, in day time, you are familiar.

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

Patrick Modiano
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 hisdisposal to correct his stumbling speech.

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

Patrick Modiano
Like many writers before me, I believe in coincidence and, sometimes, in the novelist's gift for clairvoyance- the word gift not being the right one, for it implies a kind of superiority. Clairvoyance is simply the part of profession: the essential leaps of imagination, the need to fix one's mind on detail-to the point of obsession, in fact, so as not to lose the thread and to give in one's natural laziness. All the, is tension, this cerebral exercise may well lead in the long run to flashes of intuition concerning events past and future, as defined by Larousse dictionary under clairvoyance.

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

Patrick Modiano
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.

Patrick Modiano
Ever since, the Paris wherein I have tried to retrace her steps has remained as silent and deserted as it was on the day. I walk through empty streets. For me, they are always empty, even at dusk, during the rush hour, when the crowds are hurrying towards the mouth of metro. I think of her in spite of myself, sensing an echo of her presence in this neighbourhood or that. The other evening, it was near the Gare du Nord.

Patrick Modiano
Such photographs exist in every family. They were caught in a few seconds, the duration of the exposure, and these second have become an eternity.

Patrick Modiano
A novelist has more talent for written than oral assignments.

Patrick Modiano
I shall never know how she spent her days, where she hid, in whose company she passed the winter months of her first escape, or the few weeks of spring when she escaped for the second time. That is her secret. A poor and precious secret which not even the executioners the decrees, the occupying authorities, the Depot, the barracks, the camps, history, time – everything that corrupts and destroys you- have been able to take away from her.

Patrick Modiano
The doctor used to tell me that every person about to die becomes a music box playing the melody that best describes his life, his character, and his hopes. For some, it's a popular waltz; for others, a march.

Patrick Modiano
I always think twice before reading the biography of a writer I admire. Biographers sometimes latch onto small details, unreliable eyewitness accounts, character traits that appear puzzling or disappointing – all of which is like the crackling sound that messes with radio transmissions, making the music and the voices impossible to hear. It is only by actually reading his books that we gain intimacy with a writer. This is when he is at his best and he is speaking to us in a low voice without any of the static.

Patrick Modiano