Life's Pleasures Quote by Catherine Deneuve

She’s talking about animals, but she’s really talking about a kind of gaze: alert, private, unperforming. Deneuve’s phrasing is almost child-simple, yet it lands with the precision of someone who has spent decades being looked at. “Little animals that run and eat and hide” sketches a world of pure need and instinct, bodies doing what bodies do without apology. That’s the appeal: no narrative, no branding, no self-justification. Just motion, appetite, and survival.

The key is the double exposure in “scared and curious at the same time.” It’s the emotional cocktail of anything vulnerable that still wants to know more - the split-second tension between retreat and approach. Deneuve, a screen icon often associated with controlled coolness, slips a quiet self-portrait into that description. The subtext feels like a defense of reserve: you can be cautious without being closed, watchful without being cynical. Curiosity doesn’t cancel fear; it cohabits with it.

There’s also an implicit critique of human performance. People pose; animals don’t. In celebrity culture, faces are commodities engineered to mean something on command. Deneuve singles out animal faces because they refuse that contract; their expressions are readable but not curated, intimate but not inviting. Contextually, it fits a French star tradition of detachment as honesty: the idea that true feeling is glimpsed in fleeting, unguarded micro-moments - the very moments “hide all the time” tries to protect.