I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.
The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already the answer.
I ignored the pleasure that the written word may bring, the pleasure of penetrating within the secrets of the soul, of abandoning oneself to imagination, to the beauty and mistery of literary invention.
A writer never forgets the first time he accepts some coins or a praise in exchange for a story. He never forgets the first time he feels in his blood the sweet venom of vanity and believes that, if he shall be able to hide to all his lack of talent, the dream of literature may give him a roof above his head, warm food at the end of the day and above all everything he had ever desired for: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that will surely live more than he ever shall. A writer is for ever condemned to remember that moment, because by then he is already lost and his soul already has a price.
The majority of the traditions are not other that the diseases of a society.
She possessed a strange charm that seduced in a slow but relentless way.
One doesn't know what thirst is until one drinks for the first time.
One of the many traps of childhood is that it is not necessary to understand to suffer.
If a doctor had been present, perhaps he would have been able to stop the haemorrhaging that took Penelope's life, while she shrieked and scratched at the locked door, on the other side of which her father wept in silence and her mother cowered, staring at her husband. (...) When at last they opened the door and found Penelope lying dead in a pool of her own blood, hugging a shining, purple-coloured baby, nobody was capable of uttering a single word.
You don't find the truth, she finds you.