“I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself”

“I went to get a detective story. You have to kill time. But time will kill me too - and there´s the true, preestablished balance.”

“There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.'There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me.”

“No one would take me just as I was, no one loved me; I shall love myself enough, I thought, to make up for this abandonment by everyone. Formerly, I had been quite satisfied with myself, but I had taken very little trouble to increase my self-knowledge; from now on, I would stand outside myself, watch over and observe myself; in my diary I had long conversations with myself. I was entering a world whose newness stunned me. I learned to distinguish between distress and melancholy, lack of emotion and serenity; I learned to recognize the hesitations of the heart, and its ecstasies, the splendor of great renunciations, and the subterranean murmurings of hope. I entered into exalted trances, as on those evenings when I used to gaze upon the sky full of moving clouds behind the distant blue of the hills; I was both the landscape and its beholder: I existed only through myself, and for myself… My path was clearly marked: I had to perfect, enrich and express myself in a work of art that would help others to live.”

“--There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time.--But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.”

“I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me.”

“Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me”