Annie Ernaux

"I can no longer think of any way to change my life except by having a baby. I will never sink lower than that."

"I am beginning to reach the age when I say hello to the old women I meet in my neighborhood, anticipating the moment in life when I shall be one of them. When I was twenty I didn't notice them; they would be dead before my face had wrinkles."

"The worst thing about shame is that we imagine we are the only ones to experience it."

"Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people."

"I love my life, I like to be cosmopolitan, I would like to visit the whole earth and love it all."

"I am endowed by shame's vast memory, more detailed and implacable than any other, a gift unique to shame."