Natalia Ginzburg Quotes

Our dreams are never realized and as soon as we see them betrayed we realize that the intensest joys of our life have nothing to do with reality. No sooner do we see them betrayed than we are consumed with regret for the time when they glowed within us. And in this succession of hopes and regrets our life slips by.

(there must have been other writers whom you regarded as models.) NG: In my adolescence, the Russians were tremendously important to me. More than anyone, Chekhov. Of the Italians, Svevo, the Moravia of Gli Indifferenti. When I started writing these were the writers I kept before me.

Groups? Movements? I don’t really think these groups exist. I don’t think in Italy there even are such things as currents or trends. The whole scene is really much too chaotic for such groups to form and stay together as separate entities.

Every time I sit down to write a book I feel that I have to start from zero, that I have to re-learn how to write.

I believe the family to be terribly important, even when it is obsessive or repressive or full of insidious germs which can pollute life. But it’s a necessary institution, a way in which children become adults, for which there’s no substitute.

He knew how to find time to study and to write, to earn his living and to wander idly through the streets he loved; whereas we, who staggered from laziness to frantic activity and back again, wasted our time trying to decide whether we were lazy or industrious

for a mistake, my God, you don’t make a child suffer!

unfortunately, a great number of judges and social workers are rigidly unable to judge cases in a human way.

Style is not something that can be improvised: one has to construct it, to make it.