Reviews
The woman destroyed… as in the woman who destroyed love but also as in the woman who was destroyed by love…
To be trapped in the belief that you merely exist for love, marriage and family, and that without these, life is meaningless and you are nothing… how devastating.
I think I liked this book, it just really sent me into a spiral about my relationship.
Highlights
Your fault was believing that love could last. I’ve grasped the situation: as soon as I begin to grow fond of a man, I find another.
I’ve lost my own image. I did not look at it often; but it was there, in the background, just as [he] had drawn it for me. A straightforward, genuine, “authentic” woman, without mean-mindedness, uncompromising, but at the same time understanding, indulgent, sensitive, deeply feeling, intensely aware of things and of people, passionately devoted to those she loved and creating happiness for them. A fine life, serene, full, “harmonious.” It is dark: I cannot see myself anymore. And what do the others see? Maybe something hideous.
I realized that it was my past and my whole life that were going to be taken away from me—that I had already lost.
Why doesn’t he love me anymore? The question is why did he love me in the first place. One never asks oneself. Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself—exactly oneself and no one else—and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else. He loved me, that’s all. And for ever, since I should always be me.
Oh, what does it matter? I’m beyond caring about what people think. I am too utterly destroyed. I don’t give a damn for the picture they may draw of me. It’s a matter of survival.
I feel utterly wretched.
I felt something piercing in my heart—a happiness that hurt, so unaccustomed had it become.
Usually I am not afraid of being alone. Indeed, in small doses, I find it a relief—the presence of people I love overburdens my heart. I grow anxious about a wrinkle or a yawn. And so as not to be a nuisance—or absurd—I have to bottle up my anxieties, rein back my impulses. The times when I think of them from a distance are restful breaks.
he disappeared. For ever. He will never come back. It will not be he who comes back.
I expect a lot of the people I love—too much, perhaps. I expect a lot, and I even ask for it. But I do not know how to insist.
Idiotic vanity. All women think they are different; they all think there are some things that will never happen to them; and they are all wrong.
What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.
They are solid; they are real: yet their abandoned state changes them into a fantastic pretense—of what, one wonders.
People can’t bear being told what you really think of them. They want you to believe their fine words or at least to pretend to.
And this rebirth and this permanence gave me a feeling of eternity. The world seemed to me as fresh and new as it had been in the first ages, and this moment sufficed to itself. I was there, and I was looking at the tiled roofs at our feet, bathed in the moonlight, looking at them for no reason, looking at them for the pleasure of seeing them. There was a piercing charm in this lack of involvement. “That’s the great thing about writing,” I said. “Pictures lose their shape; their colors fade. But words you carry away with you.”
We relapsed into silence. Was it going to settle there between us for good? A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into? Were we going to spend another fifteen, twenty, years without any particular grievance or enmity but each enclosed in his own world, wholly bent on his own problem, brooding over his own private failure, words grown wholly useless?