Albert Cohen / 1895–1981 / Corfu, Kingdom of Greece / International Administrator, Novelist, Memoirist
Babies
A baby staggers like a drunkard. Charming, this baby, not dangerous, doesn’t judge Jews. Makes me feel like kissing him. No. Too blond. An anti-Semite in twenty years.
Belle du Seigneur [The Master’s Beauty] (1968).
Eternal Life
Brothers, my human brothers, force me to believe in eternal life.
Le livre de ma mère [The Book of My Mother] (1954).
Fatherland
Yes, the words, the land of my birth, they console me and compensate, but they would not bring me my mother back.
Le livre de ma mère [The Book of My Mother] (1954).
Habit
Having become protocol and polite ritual, the words of love glided along on the oilcloth of habit.
Belle du Seigneur [The Master’s Beauty] (1968).
Happiness
Suddenly, at my work table, because all is in order and I have a cup of hot coffee and have just lit a cigarette and because I have a lighter that works and my fountain pen works well and I am near the fire and my cat, I experience a moment of great happiness that moves me. I pity myself for this childish capacity for immense joy which foretells nothing good. How much pity I feel to see myself so contented on account of a fountain pen that works well, pity for this poor bastard of a heart which wants to stop suffering and to grab onto some reason to live.
Le livre de ma mère [The Book of My Mother] (1954).
More words, fast, if we stop speaking unhappiness insinuates itself.
Belle du Seigneur [The Master’s Beauty] (1968).
Human Race
The human race will expire from cruelty.
Belle du Seigneur [The Master’s Beauty] (1968).
Life and Death
. . . man lives for the blink of an eye and then rots forever, and every day you take another step closer to the hole in the ground where you will molder in great stupidity and silence with nothing for company but worms, white and fat like those in flour or cheese, which penetrate all your orifices to feed.
Belle du Seigneur [The Master’s Beauty] (1968).\
Quite alone we are, the two of us, you in the earth, me in my bedroom. Me, a little bit dead among the living, you, a little bit alive among the dead.
Le livre de ma mère [The Book of My Mother] (1954).
Loneliness
Le livre de ma mère [The Book of My Mother] (1954).
Alone dwells every man and everyone mocks everyone else, and a deserted island is our pain.
With her alone I was not alone. Now I am alone with everyone.
Le livre de ma mère [The Book of My Mother] (1954).
In my solitude I sing to myself a sweet lullaby, as sweet as my mother used to sing to me.
Le livre de ma mère [The Book of My Mother] (1954).
Love.
This happened in the blink of an eye and she looked at me without seeing me, and it was glory and spring and the sun and the warm sea and her diaphanous presence on the shore and my youth restored, and the world was born.
Belle du Seigneur [The Master’s Beauty] (1968).
Solemn among the loveless couples, preoccupied by themselves alone, they tasted each other, careful, profound, abandoned. Feeling blessed to be held and guided, she disregarded everyone else, listened to the happiness in her veins, sometimes admiring them in the high mirrors on the walls, elegant, moving, exceptional, a woman loved, sometimes craning her head to see him better as he murmured marvels she did not always understand, for she watched him too much, but which she always approved with her whole soul . . . she whispered that they had their whole lives, and suddenly she was afraid she had displeased him, too sure of herself, but no, O happiness, he smiled at her and kept on holding her close to him . . .
Belle du Seigneur [The Master’s Beauty] (1968).
Whoever wishes to be loved religiously makes a pact with the devil, because he loses his soul. Women have forced me to pretend to be cruel. I will never forgive them!
Belle du Seigneur [The Master’s Beauty] (1968).
Others take weeks and months to arrive at loving, and at loving a little, and they require discussions and shared tastes and crystallizations. Me, it was the time of the blink of an eye.
Belle du Seigneur [The Master’s Beauty] (1968).
She did not doubt that he was coming to adore her awkwardness and that he remained silent to make it last.
Belle du Seigneur [The Master’s Beauty] (1968).
Kneeling, men were ridiculous, they were proud and handsome, and to live was sublime.
Belle du Seigneur [The Master’s Beauty] (1968).
If poor Romeo had suddenly had his nose cut clean off in an accident, when Juliet next saw him she would have fled in horror. Thirty grams less meat and Juliet’s soul is no longer nobly stirred. Thirty grams less and that is the end of sublime moonlit babble, of “It is not yet near day: it was the nightingale, and not the lark.”
Le livre de ma mère [The Book of My Mother] (1954).
Marseille
She had loved everything about Marseille, noisy Longue-des-Capucins Street with its foodstuffs on display and its criers, the fish market with its strapping, loud-mouthed lads, Rome Street, Saint-Férréol Street, la Canebière, the Old Port with its narrow, sinister, yet friendly streets filled with feline, sway-hipped, and pock-marked gentlemen driving dangerously.
Belle du Seigneur [The Master’s Beauty] (1968).
Memory
Go away, image of my living mother, full of life, as I saw her in France for the last time. Go away! My mother’s ghost.
Le livre de ma mère [The Book of My Mother] (1954).
I say to myself that her little hands are no longer warm, and that never again will I carry them so soft to my forehead.
Le livre de ma mère [The Book of My Mother] (1954).
Mother and Son
Human friends, friends in hardship and in life, this is our pure love, love of mother and son.
Le livre de ma mère [The Book of My Mother] (1954).
My true single consolation is that she is not present to see me in my agony at her death.
Le livre de ma mère [The Book of My Mother] (1954).
In my sleep, which is the song of the tombs, I have just seen her again, as beautiful as in her youth.
Le livre de ma mère [The Book of My Mother] (1954).
She answers no more, the one who used to answer always.
Le livre de ma mère [The Book of My Mother] (1954).
She does not talk anymore, the one who used to talk so pleasantly.
Le livre de ma mère [The Book of My Mother] (1954).
She waited three hours for me in that square. Three hours which I could have spent with her. While she was waiting for me, wreathed in patience, I chose to concern myself, stupidly enthralled, with some poetic amber damsel, abandoning the wheat for the chaff. I missed three hours of my mother’s life. And for whom, good God? For an Atalanta, an attractive arrangement of flesh. I dared to prefer an Atalanta to the most sacred goodness, to my mother’s love, my mother’s incomparable love.
Incidentally, if some sudden illness had deprived me of my strength or merely all my teeth, the poetic damsel would have pointed me out and ordered her maid to sweep away that toothless garbage. . . . Her soul would have made off on wings of scorn. Those noble creatures love men who are strong, energetic, and assertive—in other words, gorillas. Toothless or not, strong or weak, young or old, our mothers love us. And the weaker we are, the more they love us. Our mothers’ incomparable love.
Le livre de ma mère [The Book of My Mother] (1954).
Nobility
Nobility is a matter of vocabulary.
Belle du Seigneur [The Master’s Beauty] (1968).
Poverty
Not to become poor with a poor man’s soul. Poverty debases us. The poor man becomes ugly and takes the bus, washes less, smells of perspiration, counts his change, loses his nobility and can no longer despise sincerely. One hardly despise what one possesses and dominates. Goethe was better than Rousseau at despising.
Belle du Seigneur [The Master’s Beauty] (1968).
Power
How great the suffering we can inflict on those who love us and how frightful the power to do harm that we have over them. And how we make use of that power.
Le livre de ma mère [The Book of My Mother] (1954).
Purposelessness
Outside, everywhere, a relentless rain recounted their unhappiness. Caught in a mousetrap of love, condemned for life to the labor of love, they were lying next to each other, beautiful, tender lovers and purposeless. Purposeless.
Belle du Seigneur [The Master’s Beauty] (1968).
Taste
. . . the poor are vulgar, not interested in beauty, in what elevates the soul, very different indeed from Queen Marie of Romania who in her memoirs blessed the faculty that God, it seems, gave her “of feeling deeply the beauty of things and of rejoicing in it.” Exquisite attentiveness by the Everlasting.
Belle du Seigneur [The Master’s Beauty] (1968).
Writing
What a strange little happiness, sad and limping but sweet as a sin or a hidden bottle, what happiness it is, after all, to write in this moment, alone in my kingdom and far from the bastards.
Le livre de ma mère [The Book of My Mother] (1954).