For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.
If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
But all years are stupid. It’s only when they’re over that they become interesting.
Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one’s own pleasure is shared.
Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.
There is only one pleasure-that of being alive. All the rest is misery.
You’ve got to understand life, understand it when you’re young.
There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.
You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering .
The cadence of suffering has begun.
You will be loved the day when you will be able to show your weakness without the other person using it to assert his strength.
Un paese ci vuole, non fosse che per il gusto di andarsene via.
She had wanted to behave like a fully grown woman and it had not come off.
Someone who has suffered is no longer the same.
If all this were true, how easy it would be to understand people.
Della mia infanzia non mi restava altro che l’estate. Le vie strette che sbucavano nei campi da ogni parte, di giorno e di sera, erano i cancelli della vita e del mondo.
Gli uomini che hanno una tempestosa vita interiore e non cercano sfogo nei discorsi o nella scrittura sono semplicemente uomini che non hanno una tempestosa vita interiore.
Esistono amori che non siano egoismo, che non vogliano ridurre l’uomo o la donna al proprio comodo?
In sostanza chiedevo un letargo, un anestetico, una certezza di essere ben nascosto. Non chiedevo la pace nel mondo, chiedevo la mia.
A woman, unless she is an idiot, sooner or later meets a piece of human wreckage and tries to rescue him. She sometimes succeeds. But a woman, unless she is an idiot, sooner or later finds a sane, healthy man and makes a wreck of him. She always succeeds.
A quei tempi era sempre festa.