But it was incredible how fear and danger never produced ignoble words but always true ones, words that were torn from your very heart. - Natalia Ginzburg

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.

Fanfares of trumpets usually announced only small, futile things, it was a way fate had of teasing people. You felt a great exaltation and heard a loud fanfare of trumpets in the sky. But the serious things of life, on the contrary, took you by surprise, they spurted up all of a sudden like water.

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