In raising children, aim at the great virtues (generosity, love of truth, courage, contempt for danger) rather than the little ones (thrift, prudence, caution, desire for success); if you teach the great the little will arrive on their own, but teaching the little first never produces the great. The little virtues are not even a lower rung of the same ladder; they belong to a different and meaner spirit.
Confined with her family to a poor southern Italian village during fascism, the author lived a monotonous life she longed to escape, only to have her husband later arrested and die in a Roman prison. Looking back she concludes that this exile was the best time of her life, recognizable as happiness only after it had ended and could not return.
Writing done in sorrow can tempt you to pity yourself and to use the craft as consolation, which produces sentimental and dishonest work; one must master suffering and look at it coldly before it can be written truthfully. Happiness and unhappiness both feed the work, but only once the writer has stopped crying over them.
A true calling to write is not a hobby one picks up and sets down but a master that demands to be served exclusively, refusing to share the writer's attention with ambition, comfort, or distraction. Periods away from it feel like exile, and returning restores a sense of one's real self.
A relationship can be portrayed not through events but through a catalogue of contrasting habits and tastes between two people (one who loves museums and order, one who is restless and forgetful), showing that intimacy coexists with persistent, unresolved difference. The accumulation of small oppositions, rather than conflict or harmony, becomes the portrait of the bond.