Valeria

“When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you're always protecting me... I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can't I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman's place!”
― E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

“...for music alone can abolish differences
of language or culture between two people and invoke something indestructible within them.”
― Irene Nemirovsky, Suite Française

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“What lurking temptations to forbidden tenderness find their finding-places in a woman's dressing-gown, when she is alone in her room at night!”
― Wilkie Collins, The Haunted Hotel: A Mystery of Modern Venice