The Lost Daughter Quotes
"I felt miraculously unfettered, as if a difficult job, finally brought to completion, no longer weighed me down."
"Every request seemed light, every task that had to do with them an affectionate habit."
"It seemed to me that my thoughts had returned to their proper speed."
"The hours slipped away in such a gentle mixture of work, daydreams, and idleness that I decided I would keep going back there."
"Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote."
"I realized long ago that I’ve held onto little of myself and everything of them."
"But no, I felt an unease as if faced with a thing done badly."
"A child who gets lost on the beach sees everything unchanged and yet no longer recognizes anything."
"Engineering—nature is engineering, so is culture, science is right behind, only chaos is not an engineer—and, along with it, the furious need to reproduce."
"Compassion doesn’t have anything to do with it, I thought, there was no question of a generous feeling."
"I felt like a drop that slides over a leaf after the rain, carried along by a clearly inevitable movement."
"Reading, writing have always been my way of soothing myself."
"Sometimes, when I saw Bianca or Marta suffer because they felt outdone, I couldn’t resist, I intervened rudely with their friends who were too extroverted, too attractive, too ingratiating."
"I realized that they slid lewdly from me to rest on the girls; I was alarmed, and gratified."
"I was content when they told me, laughing, that the boys had found me a young and good-looking mother."
"What I wanted of them I never understood, I don’t know even now."
"Sometimes you have to escape in order not to die."
"How foolish to think you can tell your children about yourself before they’re at least fifty."
"Choose for your companion an alien daughter. Look for her, approach her."
"Once I had a very closeup view of what it means to be in love, the powerful and joyous irresponsibility that it unleashes."
"We are obliged to do so many stupid things from childhood on, thinking they’re essential; what happened to us is the only thing that has happened to me since I was born that makes sense."
"I imagined myself in her place, free, traveling with an unknown man whom I desired at every moment and by whom at every moment I was desired."
"No habit, no sensations dulled by predictability."
"You wait, you get tired, you start waiting again. Something will happen and in the meantime you become more and more fed up, perhaps dangerous."
"I didn’t want to argue—better this tranquil lullaby of clichés."
"In the end what we need above all is kindness, even if it is pretended."
"I was like someone who is taking possession of her own life, and feels a host of things at the same time, among them an unbearable absence."
"No, I returned for the same reason I left: for love of myself."
"That I felt more useless and desperate without them than with them."
"One morning I discovered that the only thing I really wanted to do was peel fruit, making a snake, in front of my daughters, and then I began to cry."
"My mother used another word, she called it a shattering."
"You can’t bear staying together with yourself and you have certain thoughts you can’t say."
"Today you can live perfectly well even if it doesn’t pass."
"I myself was playing now, a mother is only a daughter who plays, it was helping me think."
"I wasn’t newly youthful but aged, excessively thin, a body so lean as to seem without depth."