The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.

For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one's trouble does not make it any better.

Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.

There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.

A work settles nothing, just as the labor of a whole generation settles nothing. Sons, and the morrow, always start afresh.

You don't remember days, you remember moments.