Time & Perspective Quote by Catherine Deneuve

Deneuve’s line lands with the bluntness of lived observation, not the polish of a slogan. She’s pointing to a cultural mistake that still has teeth: treating abuse as an event you “get over,” like a bad review or a breakup. By saying it “comes out,” she frames trauma as something that leaks into the present - through choices, intimacy, self-protection, work, even the body - whether or not the survivor wants it to. The phrase “a very long time ago” matters; it challenges the calendar-based logic that courts, tabloids, and sometimes friends apply to harm: if it’s old, it’s settled.

The subtext is a pushback against the demand for neat victim narratives. The public often rewards stories with clean arcs: disclose, heal, triumph. Deneuve is emphasizing the messier truth: damage can be delayed, disguised, or misread as temperament. Her wording also reveals the constraints of her era and milieu. As a French actress whose career spans decades of a film industry notorious for power imbalances, she’s speaking from inside a system that historically romanticized transgression and minimized women’s pain. That makes the sentence feel like an attempt to acknowledge long-term consequences without turning confessional or activist in tone.

Even the hedging - “Even if” - carries tension: she anticipates skepticism. The line works because it names an afterlife of abuse that is socially inconvenient, refusing both melodrama and dismissal. It’s not poetry; it’s diagnosis.