Deborah Levy

Smoking cheap Spanish filthy sock-tobacco under a pine tree was so much better than trying to hold it together on escalators.

There was something comforting about being literally lost when I was lost in every other way

When happiness is happening it feels as if nothing else happened before it, it is a sensation that happens only in the present tense.

was always gathering evidence for something I could not fathom.

‘To speak up is not about speaking lou

is about feeling entitled to voice a wish.

Now that we were mothers we were all shadows of our former selves, chased by the women we used to be before we had children.

The world loved the delusion more than it loved the mother.

It required us to be passive but ambitious, maternal but erotically energetic, self-sacrificing but fulfilled — we were to be Strong Modern Women whilst being subjected to all kinds of humiliations, both economic and domestic.

‘No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.’