There is something female about being dead.

It was only after her death that I realized who she was: the apparently magical force at the center of our family who'd kept us all invisibly spinning in the powerful orbit around her.

She just died? Wow. I didn't know that. You are telling me now for the first time. She led an amazing life. What else can you say? Whether you agreed or not, she was an amazing woman who led an amazing life. I am actually sad to hear that.

[…] but her mother's death had revealed that there was no metaphor too ostentatious for grief. It was a terrible thing and demanded embellishment.

I am a dead woman. Dead and insane.

It was said she mourned her beauty, which people still spoke of as of a vanished champion from another age. She had buried herself alive in public, on

She was born without reason … to die; and she dies without reason….

But now she was fifty-seven, and suddenly ancient. Soon she would be dead. Dead. You can’t get any more ancient than that.

The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.

There was something strange and extraordinary about her – something that was frightening and at the same time most exciting.

As strange as it seemed, I knew in my heart that one day her death would affect me, and stranger still, that mine would affect her.

When she had just died, I could not help being affected. Soon, however, I examined the matter from the very beginning. At the very beginning, she was not living, having no form, nor even substance. But somehow or other there was then her substance, then her form, and then her life. Now by a further change, she has died. The whole process is like the sequence of the four seasons, spring, summer, autumn, and winter. While she is thus lying in the great mansion of the universe, for me to go about weeping and wailing would be to proclaim myself ignorant of the natural laws. Therefore I stopped!

She didn't seem dead. There was only a swelling of the lips, as if she were angry. The strange thing was her idea of renting a painter's studio, having an armchiar, no less, drawn up s she could die in front of the window that looked toward Superga. A cat had given her away–it was in the room with her, and the next day, miaowing and scratching the door, it had made them open.

Absolute terror seemed paradoxically to have lent a lucidity to her thoughts and words that was entirely out of character.