Nowhere is one more alone than in Paris ... and yet surrounded by crowds. Nowhere is one more likely to incur greater ridicule. And no visit is more essential.

Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable. A journalist is someone who looks at the world and the way it works, someone who takes a close look at things every day and reports what she sees, someone who represents the world, the event, for others. She cannot do her work without judging what she sees.

It's afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didn't necessarily prove that you loved him.

A woman's work, from the time she gets up to the time she goes to bed, is as hard as a day at war, worse than a man's working day. ... To men, women's work was like the rain-bringing clouds, or the rain itself. The task involved was carried out every day as regularly as sleep. So men were happy - men in the Middle Ages, men at the time of the Revolution, and men in 1986: everything in the garden was lovely.

In a thousand years time this day will have existed for a thousand years to the day. And the ignorance of the whole world about what they've said today will have a date too.

The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.

Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable.