Top 15 Natalia Ginzburg Quotes

if we ourselves have a vocation, if we have not betrayed it, if over the years we have continued to love it, to serve it passionately, we are able to keep all sense of ownership out of our love for our children. But if on the other hand we do not have a vocation, or if we have abandoned it or betrayed it out of cynicism or a fear of life, or because of mistaken parental love, or because of some little virtue that exists within us, then we cling to our children as a shipwrecked mariner clings to a tree trunk.

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.

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

Human relationships have to be rediscovered every day. We have to remember constantly that every kind of meeting with our neighbor is a human action and so it is always evil or good, true or deceitful, a kindness or a sin.

What we must remember above all in the education of our children is that their love of life should never weaken.

When I write something I usually think it is very important and that I am a very fine writer. I think this happens to everyone. But there is one corner of my mind in which I know very well what I am, which is a small, a very small writer. I swear I know it. But that doesn't matter much to me. Only, I don't want to think about names: I can see that if I am asked 'a small writer like who?' it would sadden me to think of the names of other small writers. I prefer to think that no one has ever been like me, however small, however much a mosquito or a flea of a writer I may be. The important thing is to be convinced that this really is your vocation, your profession, something you will do all your life.

what a job of ants and horses translation is. (PB: Ants and horses?) NG: One has to be as exact and industrious as an ant and have the impetus, the strength, of a horse to pull ahead.

A journalist recently said in the newspapers that writers should keep their mouths shut as much as possible and I think he was probably right. Better to write than to speak.

(PB: You wrote your essay “The Little Virtues” a long time ago, really in another age. A number of American readers are very much taken with the piece while finding it a direct challenge to their familiar assumptions. Would you still offer parents the same advice with regard to the upbringing of their children or have your thoughts changed?) NG: I’m sure that I would write exactly the same thing; even in these difficult times one should only teach the big virtues, generosity more than anything else. The rest can be learned later on.

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.

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

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

My Jewish identity became extremely important to me from the moment the Jews began to be persecuted. At that point I became aware of myself as a Jew. But I came from a mixed marriage—my father was Jewish, my mother Catholic. My parents were atheists and therefore chose not to give us, the children, any religious instruction. They were totally non-observant. You might say that a Hebrew spirit dominated the household in the sense that my father had a very strong, very authoritarian character. And I suppose it’s true that many of the family friends were Jews, but many were not. So, while I did not have any sort of formal Jewish upbringing, I nevertheless felt my Jewishness very acutely during the war years (my first husband, Leone Ginzburg, was a Jew) and after the war, when it became known what had been done to the Jews in the camps by the Nazis. Suddenly my Jewishness became very important to me.

in my own work...there’s an important sense of the visual, of the visualized. I see it all so vividly. It’s not that I don’t see what I imagine. If I don’t see it then I can’t write anything.