s. 12–13
For twenty years I studied Italian as if I were swimming along the edge of that lake. Always next to my dominant language, English. Always hugging that shore. It was good exercise. Beneficial for the muscles, for the brain, but not very exciting. If you study a foreign language that way, you won’t drown. The other language is always there to support you, to save you. But you can’t float without the possibility of drowning, of sinking. To know a new language, to immerse yourself, you have to leave the shore. Without a life vest. Without depending on solid ground.
s. 18
When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.
s. 26
I find that reading in another language is more intimate, more intense than reading in English, because the language and I have been acquainted for only a short time. We don’t come from the same place, from the same family. We didn’t grow up with one another. This language is not in my blood, in my bones. I’m drawn to Italian and at the same time intimidated. It remains a mystery, beloved, impassive. Faced with my emotion it has no reaction. The unknown words remind me that there’s a lot I don’t know in this world.
s. 28
I feel a bond with every word I pick up. I feel affection, along with a sense of responsibility. When I can’t remember words, I fear I’ve abandoned them.
s. 34
She considered herself imperfect, like the first draft of a book. She wanted to produce another version of herself, in the same way that she could transform a text from one language into another. At times she had the impulse to remove her presence from the earth, as if it were a thread on the hem of a nice dress, to be cut off with a pair of scissors.
s. 40
Why do I write? To investigate the mystery of existence. To toleratemyself. To get closer to everything that is outside of me.
s. 43
My writing in Italian is, just like a bridge, something constructed, fragile. It might collapse at any moment, leaving me in danger. English flows under my feet. I’m aware of it: an undeniable presence, even if I try to avoid it. Like the water in Venice, it remains the stronger, more natural element, the element that forever threatens to swallow me. Paradoxically, I could survive without any trouble in English; I wouldn’t drown. And yet, because I don’t want any contact with the water, I build bridges.
s. 50
I think that translating is the most profound, most intimate way of reading. A translation is a wonderful, dynamic encounter between two languages, two texts, two writers. It entails a doubling, a renewal.
s. 52
A foreign language is a delicate, finicky muscle. If you don’t use it, it gets weak.
s.  53
When the language one identifies with is far away, one does everything possible to keep it alive. Because words bring back everything: the place, the people, the life, the streets, the light, the sky, the flowers, the sounds. When you live without your own language you feel weightless and, at the same time, overloaded. You breathe another type of air, at a different altitude. You are always aware of the difference.
s. 65
One could say that the mechanism of metamorphosis is the only element of life that never changes. The journey of every individual, every country, every historical epoch, of the entire universe and all it contains, is nothing but a series of changes, at times subtle, at times deep, without which we would
stand still. The moments of transition, in which something changes, constitute the backbone of all of us. Whether they are a salvation or a loss, they are moments that we tend to remember. They give a structure to our existence.
s.  77
Writing in another language represents an act of demolition, a newbeginning.
s. 82
It was only after writing this book that I discovered Ágota Kristóf, an author of Hungarian origin who wrote in French. Maybe it was best that I didn’t know her voice and her works before—to have taken this step unaware of her example. I read, first of all, a brief autobiographical text, The Illiterate, inwhich she talks about her literary education and the experience of arriving in Switzerland, at twenty-one, as a refugee. She begins to learn French, a hard, demanding process. She writes: