My life, the most truthful one, is unrecognizable, extremely interior, and there is no single word that gives it meaning.

How was she to tie herself to a man without permitting him to imprison her? And was there some means of acquiring things without those things possessing her?

Ignorance of the law of irreducibility was no excuse. I could no longer excuse myself with the claim that I didn't know the law -- for knowledge of self and of the world is the law that, even though unattainable, cannot be broken, and no one can excuse himself by saying that he doesn't know it. . . . The renewed originality of the sin is this: I have to carry out my unknowing, I shall be sinning originally against life.

Putting my hand in someone else’s has always been my definition of happiness. Before I fall asleep, often - in that small struggle not to lose consciousness and go into the greater world - often, before I get up the courage to go into the vastness of sleep, I pretend that someone has my hand in theirs, and then I go, go to that enormous absence of form that is sleep. And when even after that I don’t have courage, I dream.

What I want is to live of that initial and primordial something that was what made some things reach the point of aspiring to be human.

A horse is freedom so indominable that it becomes useless to imprison it to serve man: it lets itself be domesticated, but with a simple, rebellious toss of the head-shaking its mane like an abundance of free-flowing hair-it shows that its inner nature is always wild, translucent and free.

Whether she won or lost, she would continue to wrestle with life. It would not be with her own life alone but with all of life. Something had finally been released within her. And there it was, the sea.