For that's what a woman, a mother wants - to teach her children to take an interest in life. She knows it's safer for them to be interested in other people's happiness than to believe in their own.

A book consists of two layers: on top, the readable layer ... and underneath, a layer that was inaccessible. You only sense its existence in a moment of distraction from the literal reading, the way you see childhood through a child. It would take forever to tell what you see, and it would be pointless.

The house a woman creates is a Utopia. She can't help it - can't help trying to interest her nearest and dearest not in happiness itself but in the search for it.

We, her children, are heroic, dersperate.

You alone became the outer surface of my life, the side I never see, and you will be that, the unknown part of me, until I die.

I have never waited for anything the way I've waited for today, when nothing will happen.

Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.