“I had power, the power of respectable people, because I had a degree, because I spoke in Italian, I wrote books.” p. 41
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“He would rather be liked by those in charge than fight for an idea.” p. 60
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“How I suffered in situations where approval suddenly vanished: I lost confidence, I felt dragged down to my origins, I felt politically incapable, I felt I was a woman who would have been better off not opening her mouth…” p. 73
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“…was I lying to my audience when I played the part of someone who, with her two small books, had sought to help every woman confess what she couldn’t say to herself? Were they mere formulas that it was convenient for me to believe in while in fact I was no different from my more traditional contemporaries? In spite of all the talk was I letting myself be invented by a man to the point where his needs were imposed on mine and those of my daughters?” p. 98
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“At those moments I saw myself suddenly for what I was: a slave, willing to always do what he wanted, careful not to exaggerate in order not to get him in trouble, not to displease him. I wasted my time cooking for him, washing the dirty clothes he left in the house, listening to all his troubles at the university and in the many responsibilities that he was accumulating…” p. 126
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“Maestra Oliviero was right, I’m bad. I don’t even know how to keep friendship alive… there is always a solvent that acts slowly with a gentle heat, and undoes everything, even when there’s no earthquake. So please, if I insult you, if I say ugly things to you, stop up your ears, I don’t want to do it and yet I do. Please, please, don’t leave me, or I’ll fall in.” p. 158
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“I was subject to Nino’s authority to that craving of men to make a good impression by appearing determined, saviors…” p. 179
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“‘Don’t believe him. At first he helped me clear, he washed the dishes: today he doesn’t even pick his socks up off the floor.’ ‘That’s not true,’ he protested. ‘Yes, it is. He wants to liberate the women of others but not his.’ ‘Well, your liberation shouldn’t necessarily signify the loss of my freedom.‘” p. 209
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“A book, an article, could make noise, but ancient warriors before the battle also made noise, and if it wasn’t accompanied by real force and immeasurable violence it was only theater…” p. 281
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“Naples was the great European metropolis where faith in technology, in science, in economic development, in the kindness of nature, in history that leads of necesssity to improvement, in democracy, was revealed, most clearly and far in advance, to be completely without foundation. To be born in that city… is useful for only one thing: to have always known, almost instinctively, what today, with endless fine distinctions, everyone is beginning to claim: that the dream of unlimited progress is in reality a nightmare of savagery and death.” p. 306
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“I tried to push her toward dialect, our language of candor. But while her Italian was translated from dialect, my dialect was increasingly translated from Italian, and we both spoke a false language…” p. 330
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“There are moments when what exists on the edges of our lives, and which, it seems, will be in the background forever – an empire, a political party, a faith, a monument, but also simply the people who are part of our daily existence – collapses in an utterly unexpected way, and right when countless other things are pressing upon us.” p. 340
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“What his intelligence produced would never, alone, have had sufficient energy to assert itself, without the web of power that he had been weaving since he was a boy.” p. 368
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“The exploitation of man by man and the logic of maximum profit, whcih before had been considered an abomination, had returned to become the linchpins of freedom and democracy everywhere.” p. 389
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“Here is Vesuvius which reminds you every day that the greatest undertaking of powerful men, the most splendid work, can be reduced to nothing in a few seconds by the fire, and the earthquake, and the ash, and the sea.” p. 403
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