“I'd seen the older children in class look into books for invisible traces, as if they were driven by the same force and, sinking deeper into silence, they were able to draw from the dead paper something that seemed alive.”

“Talent consists not in inventing shapes but in causing those that were invisible to emerge.”

“I have read so many books. And yet, like most Autodidacts, I am never quite sure of what I have gained from them. There are days when I feel I have been able to grasp all there is to know in one single gaze, as if invisible branches suddenly spring out of no where, weaving together all the disparate strands of my reading. And then suddenly the meaning escapes, the essence evaporates and no matter how often I reread the same lines they seem to flee ever further with each subsequent reading and I see myself as some mad old fool who thinks her stomach is full because she's been reading the menu.”

“People think that children don't know anything. It's enough to make you wonder if grownups were ever children once upon a time.”

“So if there is something on the planet that is worth living for, I'd better not miss it, because once you're dead, it's too late for regrets, and if you die by mistake, that is really, really dumb.”

“We don't recognize each other because other people have become our permanent mirrors. If we actually realized this, if we were able to become aware of the fact that we are only ever looking at ourselves in the other person, that we are alone in the wilderness, we would go crazy.”

“No one is a greater schoolgirl in spirit than a cynic. Cynics cannot relinquish the rubbish they were taught as children: they hold tight to the belief that the world has meaning and, when things go wrong for them, they consequently adopt the inverse attitude. "Life's a whore, I don't believe in anything anymore and I'll wallow in that idea until it makes me sick" is the very credo of the innocent who hasn't been able to get his way.”