Grown-ups are an untrustworthy, treacherous lot, they don't take their games in the serious wholehearted way children do, and yet they too have their… - Italo Calvino

While the hemlock was being prepared, Socrates was learning a melody on the flute. “What use will that be to you?”, he was asked. “At least I will learn this melody before I die.

Memory, or rather experience — which is the memory of the event plus the wound it has inflicted on you, plus the change which it has wrought in you and which has made you different — experience is the basic nutrition also for a work of literature (but not only for that), the true source of wealth for every writer (but not only for the writer), and yet the minute it gives shape to a work of literature it withers and dies. The writer, after writing, finds that he is the poorest of men.

And, thinking of this judgment I would no longer be able to change, I suddenly felt a kind of relief, as if peace could come to me only after the moment when there would be nothing to add and nothing to remove in that arbitrary ledger of misunderstandings, and the galaxies which were gradually reduced to the last tail of the last luminous ray, winding from the sphere of darkness, seemed to bring with them the only possible truth about myself, and I couldn’t wait until all of them, one after the other, had followed this path.