When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...].

To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.

When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.

She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life.

In truth we need to change the society itself, men as well as women, to change everything.

I was struck by the absence, even among very young boys and girls, of any interior motivation; they were incapable of thinking, of inventing, of imagining, of choosing, of deciding for themselves; this incapacity was expressed by their conformism; in every domain of life they employed only the abstract measure of money, because they were unable to trust to their own judgment.

it is so difficult not to become vain about one's own good luck.