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Annie Ernaux Quotes

Annie Ernaux is a French writer.

She won the Prix Renaudot in 1984 for her book La Place, an autobiographical narrative focusing on her relationship with her father and her experiences growing up in a small town in France, and her subsequent process of moving into adulthood and away from her parents' place of origin.

As a child, Annie Ernaux lived in Yvetot in Normandy. Very early in her career, she turned away from fiction to concentrate on autobiography. Her work combines historic and individual experiences. She charts her parents' social progression , her adolescence , her marriage , her passionate affair with an eastern European man her abortion , Alzheimer's disease , the death of her mother and breast cancer . Ernaux also wrote L'écriture comme un couteau with Frédéric-Yves Jeannet.

Her 2008 historical memoir Les Années is considered by many to be her 'magnum opus': it was very well received by French critics and selected for the 2016 Premio Strega Europeo. In this book Ernaux writes of herself in the third person for the first time, providing a vivid look at French society from just after the Second World War until the early 2000s. It is the poignant social history of a woman and of the evolving society she lived in.

Many of her works have been translated into English and published by Seven Stories Press. Ernaux is one of the seven founding authors of the press from which it got its name.



✵ 1. September 1940
Annie Ernaux photo

Works
Mémoire de fille
Annie Ernaux
La femme gelée
Annie Ernaux
La Honte
Annie Ernaux
Annie Ernaux: 6   quotes 5   likes

Famous Annie Ernaux Quotes

“Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.”

Annie Ernaux

Source: Quoted in Melodrama after the tears, ed. Jörg Metelmann and Scott Loren (Amsterdam University Press, 2016), p. 178

“I am endowed by shame's vast memory, more detailed and implacable than any other, a gift unique to shame.”

Annie Ernaux book Mémoire de fille

Quoted in German #MeToo, ed. Elisabeth Krimmer and Patricia Simpson (Boydell & Brewer, 2022), p. 31
A Girl's Story (2016)

“I love my life, I like to be cosmopolitan, I would like to visit the whole earth and love it all.”

Annie Ernaux book Mémoire de fille

Quoted in Dissolve by Nikki Gemmell (Hachette UK, 2021)
A Girl's Story (2016)

“The worst thing about shame is that we imagine we are the only ones to experience it.”

Annie Ernaux book La Honte

Quoted in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 184, ed. Tom Burns and ‎Jeffrey Hunter (Gale, 2004), p. 164, and in The Poetics of Childhood by Roni Natov (Routledge, 2014), p. 220
Shame (1997)

“I am beginning to reach the age when I say hello to the old women I meet in my neighborhood, anticipating the moment in life when I shall be one of them. When I was twenty I didn't notice them; they would be dead before my face had wrinkles.”

Annie Ernaux

Quoted in But Enough About Me by Nancy K. Miller (Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 96
Exteriors (1993)

“I can no longer think of any way to change my life except by having a baby. I will never sink lower than that.”

Annie Ernaux book La femme gelée

Quoted in Mother Reader by Moyra Davey (Seven Stories Press, 2011), p. xvii
A Frozen Woman (1981)

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