Lou Andreas-Salomé Quotes (1861-1937)

“Outwardly and inwardly both, Lou Salomé's life is among the richest on record. She kept company -- uncannily stimulating, uncannily receptive -- with the cultural elite of her times, as judged from ours. She wrote in the widest variety of literary genres, including a couple of her own devising, happy and unhappy respectively: the diary essaylet and the achronological memoir. And by and large she wrote well: her peers among essayists at all odds are numbered.”

“In my talks with Lou, things became clear to me that I might not have found by myself. Like a catalyst, she activated my thought processes. [...] Intellectually, she was nurturing and creative. Not only encouraging – but enthralling. One felt the spark of genius in her. One grew in her presence.”

“Andreas-Salomé’s work raises questions that are still urgent today: How are the binaries of Western thought [e.g., thinking of woman as the "other" of man) effectively negotiated and transformed into difference and diversity? How do language and narrative contribute to an upsetting of conventional and fixed points of view? And, finally, how does thinking with images open processes of experience and recognition that create diversity and open-endedness?”

“Published in a traditional women's genre, Das Haus had the potential to reach far beyond limited groups of female intellectuals into the homes and lives of women who might be alienated or threatened by the political articulations of champions of the German's women's movement but could still be influenced by feminist notions of emancipation in popular fiction.”

“I am delighted to observe that nothing has altered in our respective ways of approaching a theme, whatever it may be. I strike up a -- mostly very simple melody; you supply the higher octaves for it; I separate the one from the other; and you blend what has been separated into a higher unity.”

“Salomé's construction of femininity did not challenge the ultimate fact of sexual difference or the presumption of heterosexuality head on. What Salomé did do, however, was figure woman's masculine will and strength as the mark of her completeness in herself. The double directionality of "masculinity" and "femininity" within woman only made her more woman; it differentiated her from modern man, who had renounced his own basis in what Salomé called the primal ground of life or, later, narcissism.”

“My most useful activity this summer was talking with Lou. There is a deep affinity between us in intellect and taste -- and there are in other ways so many differences that we are the most instructive objects and subjects of observation for each other. I have never met anyone who could derive so many objective insights from experience, who knows how to deduce so much from all she has learned.”

“Here then is the record of long and turbulent life, a gallery of pictures that extend from her birth in Czarist Russia to her death in Nazi Germany. An unusual life, whatever judgement we pass on it. Voila, un homme, said Napoleon when he met Goethe. By way of introducing Lou Salomé, I can only say, Voila une femme.”

“As is well known, happiness and harmony are much more difficult to portray than strife and suffering. [In her novel Das Haus] Frau Andreas-Salomé has succeeded in creating a beautiful, German image of the family without becoming cloying. It is very feminine, but this philosopher was always surprisingly feminine -- in the best sense. One thinks of the novellas in her collection, Im Zwischenland (In the Country Between). How she traces the germinating emotions of a fourteen-year-old girl; with what tenderness they are parsed. The same fine fingertips are at work here.”

“What a great revolutionary you are. -- You didn't overthrow thrones inside me. But the one throne that waited there: you strode past it gently smiling. Ever upward. And my desire, which before had crowded and become tangled around the vacant throne like wild roses, now rise as white columns around the space from whose temple friezes you smile down into my soul and bless my longing.”

“As well as foregrounding the title heroine's growth in articulating her independent resolve and her awareness of its demands and costs, Andreas-Salomé's story also weaves into the background line of its critical dialogue with male traditions intimations of possible male growth and insight.”

“She had a very quiet way of speaking and a great gift of inspiring confidence. I am still a little surprised today how much I told her then. But I had always the feeling that she not only understood everything but forgave everything. I have never again experienced such a feeling of conciliatory kindness, or, if you like, compassion, as I did with her.”