Vejune Flower’s Reviews > Penguin Classics The Prime of Life (Penguin Modern Classics). > Status Update

“by describing death, not only as a common link between the individual and mankind, but also as the major peril of loneliness and separation. Thus each book thenceforth impelled me towards its successor, for the more I saw of the world, the more I realized that it was brimming over with all I could ever hope to experience, understand, and put into words.”

“fear never stopped my taking any particular course…I did not even fear the prospect of death…it was bound to arise in my life at a certain moment. It would be the final point of life for me, true, but still a part of life; on the occasions when I believed myself face to face with it, I surrendered myself calmly to this lively adventure, never giving thought to the void that yawned for me on the farther side.

“What I wanted was to penetrate so deeply into other people's lives that when they heard my voice they would get the impression they were talking to themselves. If my words multiplied through millions of human hearts, it seemed to me that my existence, though reshaped and transfigured, would still, in a manner of speaking, survive.” I feel as though she achieved her goal.

I have been really enjoying this book. I feel like some things are shocking sometimes but her narrative gives you a sense of knowing her. The book discusses human events in a way that is truthful and therefore adds a greater sense of humanity to them.

“It’s the first occasion on which the march of time has thrust me back unanswerably into past history.” I love how this autobiography has sentences like this which make me reflect and think. You’d think that autobiographies are series of events, one to the other and a description of her feelings about said events. But this autobiography feels like it’s so much more than that, it feels like a conversation.