“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

Last update Oct. 9, 2022. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, some…" by Annie Ernaux?

Annie Ernaux 6

French writer 1940

Related quotes

“After a year or two of keeping my head down and trying to pass myself off as a normal person, I made contact with the five other people at my university who were interested in writing”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

On Writing Poetry (1995)
Context: After a year or two of keeping my head down and trying to pass myself off as a normal person, I made contact with the five other people at my university who were interested in writing; and through them, and some of my teachers, I discovered that there was a whole subterranean Wonderland of Canadian writing that was going on just out of general earshot and sight

“I don't know what my body is for other than just taking my head from room to room.”

John Mulaney (1982) American actor and comedian

Kid Gorgeous (2018)

“Other people sound flat to my ear; their words just hang in the air. But when my mother says something, the ends curl.”

Augusten Burroughs book Running with Scissors

Source: Running with Scissors

“I can in no other way overcome my imperfections and the imperfections of life than by translating the meaning of my existence into the spiritual, into that which is independent of the mortal body, that is, the abstract.”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

Quote, (August 1914); as quoted in Franz Marc, horses, ed. Christian von Holst, Hatje Cantz Publishers, (undated), 15 December 1914, p.34
by the outbreak of World War 1. in August 1914 the animals had disappeared in Marc's art. Only colours and forms – the abstract – had to evoke the spiritual]
1911 - 1914