From my childhood I have no happy memories. I don't mean to say that I never, in all of those years, felt any happiness or joy. But suffering is all-consuming: it somehow gets rid of anything that doesn't fit into its system

There is a will that exist, a desperate, continual, constantly renewed effort to place some people on a level below you, not to be on the lowest rung of the social ladder.

[...] as if youthfulness were in no way a biological fact, a simple question of age, of a moment in life, but rather a sort of privilege reserved for those who are able - thanks to their situation in life- to enjoy all those experiences, all those feeelings that get grouped together under the word adolescence.