Kudos Quotes
"The whole point of her profession, she said, was that it represented an escape from reality."
"What all publishers were looking for, he went on – the holy grail, as it were, of the modern literary scene – were those writers who performed well in the market while maintaining a connection to the values of literature."
"He had been the director of a global management company, he said, a job that involved being constantly away from home."
"In the seats in front a woman and a man were talking. It’s so sad, the woman said, and the man grunted in reply. It’s just really sad, she repeated."
"There was a pause in which the two of them looked at one another."
"It wasn’t funny,’ Linda said. ‘I felt like I was in something’s lower intestine. The building was digesting me."
"I asked her what she meant and she was silent for so long, slumped back in the booth with an impassive expression on her face, that it seemed she might not answer."
"You survived your own death,’ she added, ‘and then there’s nothing left to do except talk about it."
"I wondered whether one day I might have to pay for this privilege, and if so whether the reckoning might come in the form of female children."
"In the years that followed,’ she said, ‘I would sometimes look at her daughters and I would almost hate them for the damage and suffering that showed in their faces."
"I realised that she was happy for the first time in her life, and I realised too that she would never have known this happiness had she not gone through the unhappiness that preceded it."
"It’s what we journalists do nowadays. One day they’ll probably replace us with a computer program."
"To be honest, in the end I started to feel I was selling them a bit of a dud, because there you are encouraging them to think they can write a bestseller and solve all their problems, when actually most of them just don’t have the talent."
"My sons were pleasant and stable; they had identified career paths for themselves – one in engineering, the other in computer software – and as they prepared to leave school and go out into the world I felt confident they would make responsible citizens."
"We invent these systems with the aim of ensuring fairness, yet the human situation is so complex that it always evades our attempts to encompass it."
"The truth was that I had long wondered what might lie outside the circumscribed world of my marriage, and what freedoms and pleasures might be waiting for me there."
"At the time it had seemed inexplicable to us all that my sister would leave such a husband, driving him into acts of whose callousness she was clearly the catalyst and doing irreparable harm to her children."
"I have always been impatient with people who talk about their dreams, but I had a powerful desire to tell someone about these dreams of mine."
"She had once said that her former husband’s cold and selfish character, which none of us – she least of all – had really perceived, had been like a kind of cancer."
"The tremendous effort to conjure something out of nothing, to create this great structure of language where before there had been only blankness, was something of which he personally felt himself incapable."
"We won’t allow this depressive behaviour. We’re going to keep you in the land of the living."
"In the end there were a great number of creatures cowering there."
"The village children had already been armed with shovels and picks and even knives from the kitchen."
"Yet in my own life I have been as doomed to repetition as anyone else, even when I didn’t know what it was I was repeating."
"If you were a woman you would certainly find your mother’s life hanging over your head like a sword."
"You have seen us in strange weather. But I think it’s about to improve."
"They are always giving me advice designed to make me happier and more relaxed."
"At one time I had a love affair with England. But now, I feel lucky not to be one."
"The triumph of the second-rate, the dishonest, the ignorant."
"If I had given my children freedom, I couldn’t start dictating its terms."
"It seemed to me that it remains impossible for a woman to live without illusion, because the world will simply snuff her out."
"But most of the time she is with me, so the car stays parked outside my apartment."
"Stefano does nothing on the basis of what is right or wrong, but instead acts only according to what the law will allow him to do."
"Your cousin Angela has never worked, she said, and she has been divorced two times and is richer than the queen of England."
"You came from a nice home, she said, and yet you expect your child to live like a tramp."
"It was not her fault, she said, that I had made such a mess of my life and that I didn’t even have a proper home to live in."
"I couldn’t explain to her in front of Alessandra that this is how Stefano is finally getting his revenge."
"I have no privacy. People just act as if I’m not there."
"You can’t tell your story to everybody, I said. Maybe you can only tell it to one person."
"It would be good to walk, no? I feel like losing my bearings."
"The men no longer respect you and can treat you like the dirt on their shoe."
"But in her house there is a big attic where they can sit disturbing nobody."