Sublime

covetous

I am sure this Lotaria (that is her name) has read them conscientiously, but I believe she has read them only to find in them what she was already convinced of before reading them.

The longing for a full life glowed in me, or rather the longing for love.

chauvinist

Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.

niente della tua vita, Nicola, figurati della mia cosa puoi

Almost from childhood, she knew that a concentration camp was nothing exceptional or startling but something very basic, a given into which we are born and from which we can escape only with the greatest of efforts.

Quando atterrammo a Roma, lei si alzò per prima, si chinò e mi baciò sulle labbra sotto gli occhi meravigliati della mia amica che era appena emersa dal coma. Un mese dopo ricevetti una cartolina da Londra. La data corrispondeva a un mercoledì. C’era scritto: “Siamo felici. Grazie”. Seguivano le firme di Inés e di Enrique.

“I was always very anxious about you, about your future. When you got married you seemed to do it only in order to leave home, to be free. I thought you’d be a terrible wife, since you didn’t seem at all in love with Michele. Then it passes,” she repeated. I wanted to reply, assure her that I had never wanted to go, leave them, I wanted to say that