Fire in the Blood, Iréne Nemirovsky (1941) I've always thought that what makes a book special is the moment in your life in which you find yourself reading it, and realize how much it means to you. I remember being in Cap d'Antibes (south of France) with my family last summer. I had just turned 19 and I found myself in that bittersweet place between past and future, my life in London was still a big question mark, everything was about to change. I read it as fast as I could, I just couldn't get my eyes off those pages, the French setting, the life of a provincial town, which really remembered me of mine, the depth of the characters and their hypocrisy, the power of memory. One of the best element of the book is the use Nemirovski does of time and space, it is so perfect that one day I hope to adapt it as a theatre play or a film. It's one of those works of art so well done and versatile that it could suit every form of art. Read it, young or old. In the first case it will make you reflect upon the next step of your life and the beauty of being 20, in the second case, it will take memories back, and make you feel that fire in the blood again.
Favourite quotes:“After all, the three of us were young. It wasn’t just about the pleasure of the flesh. No, it wasn’t that simple. The flesh is easy to satisfy. It’s the heart that is insatiable, the heart that needs to love, to despair, to burn with any kind of fire…That was what we wanted. To burn, to be consumed, to devour our days just as fire devours the forest.”
"When you're twenty, love is like a fever, it makes you almost delirious. When it's over you can hardly remember how it happened...Fire in the blood, how quickly it burns itself out.”
"The way a man drinks in company tells you nothing about him, but the way he drinks when alone reveals, without his realizing it, the very depths of his soul.”
“Memories of the past would return to us more often if only we sought them out, sought their intense sweetness. But we let them slumber within us, and worse, we let them die, rot, so much so that the generous impulses that sweep through our souls when we are twenty we later call naive, foolish…Our purest, most passionate loves take on the depraved appearance of sordid pleasure.”
“When older people get together there is something unflappable about them; you can sense they’ve tasted all the heavy, bitter, spicy food of life, extract its poison, and will now spend ten or fifteen years in a state of perfect equilibrium and enviable morality. They are happy with themselves. They have renounced the vain attempts of youth to adapt the world to their desires. They have failed and now, they can relax. In a few years they will once again be troubled by a great anxiety, but this time it will be a fear of death; it will have a strange effect on their tastes, it will make them indifferent, or eccentric, or moody, incomprehensible to their families, strangers to their children. But between the ages of forty and sixty they enjoy a precarious sense of tranquility.”
"We didn't move. She seemed to be drinking me in, breathing in my heart. As for me, by the time I finally let her go I knew I had already begun to love her less."
The little Prince, Antoine De Saint-Exupéri (1943) There's a reason if this book is considered a classic in a child's education and in a grown up cultural luggage. This reason is very simple: it teaches you what friendship is, and how to make it eternal. Something we often take for granted becomes the object of study of the Little Prince's Bildungsroman. We learn how to see with the heart, how to take care of something/someone special, how to create endless bonds, how to look at stars and see them laughing. I think these quotes talk for themselves, but this book has something new to tell each time you read it.
Favourite quotes:
“Goodbye, said the fox. And now here is my secret, a very simple secret. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
"All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it."
"To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world....”
“What makes the desert beautiful,' said the little prince, 'is that somewhere it hides a well...”“It is such a mysterious place, the land of tears.”
“You - you alone will have the stars as no one else has them...In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night...You - only you - will have stars that can laugh.”
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
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