Patrick Modiano

Did you see her again in France?" I asked him.___o. When I got to France, she was already dead. She committed suicide ...___hy?___he often told me she was frightened of getting old...

Many years afterwards, we attempt to solve puzzles that were not mysteries at the time and we try to decipher half-obliterated letters from a language that is too old and whose alphabet we don't even know.

I noticed a phenomenon that doesn't often happen toa man: several women turned round as he passed them.

My wife's a lot younger than me ... thirty years difference . . . You should never marry a woman a lot younger than you ... Never ...

I had walked over to the window and was looking down at the rails of the Montmartre funicular, the gardens of the Sacré C_ur and, further off, the whole of Paris, with its lights, its roofs, its shadows. Denise Coudreuse and I had met one day in this maze of roads and boulevards. Paths that cross, among those of thousands and thousands of people all over Paris, like countless little balls on a gigantic, electric billiard table, which occasionally bump into each other. And nothing remained of this, not even the luminous trail a firefly leaves behind it.

No. She told me she was going to marry him, to get French nationality . . . She was obsessed with getting a nationality...

Nice is a city of ghosts and specters, but I hope not to become one of them right away.

That is her secret. A poor and precious secret that not even the executioners, the decrees, the occupying authorities, the Depot, the barracks, the camps, History, time-everything that defiles and destroys you-have been able to take away from her.

Finally, the horizon stretched out infinitely before me and I felt utterly content looking at stars from afar and trying to make out all the variable, temporary, extinguished or faded stars. I was nothing in this infinity, but I could finally breathe.

One should never expect anyone to reply to one's questions.

Yes, this man had the persistence of an insect.

Something__e wondered later if it was simply his youth__omething that had weighed upon him until that moment broke off him, the way a piece of rock slides slowly into the sea and disappears in a spray of foam.

How much longer would we go on being old young people? They wavedgoodbye to me. I was moved by Annette. She and I wereexactly the same age, and she'd become one of those slightlyfaded Danish beauties who used to attract me when I wastwenty. They were older than I was at that time, and I wasgrateful for their tender protection.

When he was younger, he used the slightest opportunity to slip away from people, without his being able to understand very clearly why he did so: a longing to break free and to breathe in the fresh air?

But I am a patient man. I can wait for hours in the rain.