Annie Ernaux: Quotes about life

Annie Ernaux is French writer. Explore interesting quotes on life.

Annie Ernaux: 12 quotes5 likes

“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.”

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

“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)

“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.”

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)