1. “I started to make a literary being of myself, someone who lives as if her experiences were to be written own someday.”
2. “Where are the eyes of my childhood, those fearful eyes she had thirty years ago, the eyes that made me?”
3. “Pain cannot be kept intact, it needs to be “processed,” converted into humor.”
4. “All the hardships I have endured were merely rehearsals to prepare me for this devastating pain.”
5. “She teaches me that the world is made to be pounced on and enjoyed and that there is absolutely o reason at all to hold back.”
6. “She has no name for that feeling of utter abandonment, nor the feeling that comes over her on fair days, when she stands in the courtyard from the photo, and the voice of the loudspeaker booms front behind the trees, and the music and commercials run together in an unintelligible blur. It is as if she were standing outside the fete, separated from some earlier thing.”
7. “Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.”
8. “There is no such thing as a lesser truth.”
9. “When I write I do not have the impression of looking inside me, I look inside a memory.”
10. “To grow old is to fade, to become transparent.”
11. “She feels as if a book is writing itself just behind her; all she has to do is live. But there is nothing.”
12. “To exist is to drink oneself without thirst.”
13. “My whole story as a woman: going down a fight of stairs, and hanging back at each step.”
14. “I realize that I have left part of myself in a place where I shall probably never come back.”
15. “Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my writing is to find out whether other people have done or felt the same things or, if not, for them to consider experiencing such things as normal. Maybe I would also like them to live out these very emotions in turn, forgetting that they had once read about them somewhere.”
