Quotes from Letter to a Child Never Born

“You belong neither to God nor the state nor me. You belong to yourself and no one else.”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from Letter to a Child Never Born

“And yet, or just for this reason, it's so fascinating to be a woman. It's an adventure that takes such courage, a challenge that's never boring. You'll have so many things to engage you if you're born a woman. To begin with, you'll have to struggle to maintain that if God exists he might even be an old woman with white hair or a beautiful girl. Then you'll have to struggle to explain that it wasn't sin that was born on the day when Eve picked an apple, what was born that day was a splendid virtue called disobedience.”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from Letter to a Child Never Born

“La vita é una tale fatica, bambino. E una guerra che si ripete ogni giorno, e i suoi momenti di gioia sono parentesi brevi che si pagano un prezzo crudele.”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from Letter to a Child Never Born

“To be good or bad doesn't count: life out in this world doesn't depend on that. It depends on a relation of forces based on violence. And survival is violence. You'll wear leather shoes because someone has killed a cow and skinned it to make leather.”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from Letter to a Child Never Born

“I've found what I was looking for, Child: what people call love between a man and a woman is a season. And if, at its flowering, this season is a feast of greenery, at its waning, it's only a heap of rotting leaves.”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from Letter to a Child Never Born

“One day you and I will have to have a little talk about this business called love. I still don't understand what it's all about. My guess is that it's just a gigantic hoax, invented to keep people quiet and diverted. Everyone talks about love: the priests, the advertising posters, the literati, and the politicians, those of them who make love. And in speaking of love and offering it as a panacea for every tragedy, they would and betray and kill both body and soul.”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from Letter to a Child Never Born

“No matter what system you live under, there is no escaping the law that it's always the strongest, the cruellest, the least generous who win.”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from Letter to a Child Never Born

“Life is such an effort, Child. It's a war that is renewed each day, and its moments of joy are brief parentheses for which you pay a cruel price.”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from Letter to a Child Never Born

“I know ours is a world made by men for men, their dictatorship is so ancient it even extends to language.”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from Letter to a Child Never Born

“How can a man understand a woman who is expecting a child. He can't get pregnant. Is that an advantage or a limitation? Up until yesterday it seemed to me an advantage, even a privilege. Today it seems to me a limitation, even an impoverishment. There's something glorious about enclosing another life in your own body, in knowing yourself to be two instead of one. At moments you're even invaded by a sense of triumph, and in the serenity accompanying that triumph nothing bothers you: neither the physical pain you'll have to face, nor the work you'll have to sacrifice, nor the freedom you'll have to give up.”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from Letter to a Child Never Born

“In the legends that males have invented to explain life, the first human creature is a man named Adam. Eve arrives later, to give him pleasure and cause trouble. In the paintings that adorn churches, God is an old man with a beard, never an old woman with white hair. And all the heroes are males: from Prometheus who discovered fire to Icarus who tried to fly, on down to Jesus whom they call the Son of God and of the Holy Spirit, almost as though the woman giving birth to him were an incubator or a wetnurse.”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from Letter to a Child Never Born

“Ogni responsabilità è della donna, ogni sofferenza, ogni insulto. Puttana, le dite se ha fatto l'amore con voi. La parola puttano non esiste nel dizionario: usarla è un errore di glottologia.”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from Letter to a Child Never Born

“A lot of women ask themselves why they should bring a child into the world? So that it will be hungry, so that it will be cold, so that it will be betrayed and humiliated, so that it will be slaughtered by war or disease? They reject the hope that its hunger will be satisfied, its cold warmed, that loyalty and respect will accompany it through life, that it will be a devote a life to the effort to eliminate war and disease.”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from Letter to a Child Never Born

“I'll impose upon you the same arrogance that was imposed on me, and on my mother, my grandmother, my grandmother's mother: all the way back to the first human born of another human being, whether he liked it or not. Probably, if he or she had been allowed to choose, he would have been frightened and answered: No, I don't want to be born. But no one asked their opinion, and so they were born and lived and died after giving birth to another human being who was not asked to choose, and that one did likewise, for millions of years, right down to us.”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from Letter to a Child Never Born

“the world changes and remains the same.”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from Letter to a Child Never Born

“Özgürlük adına lime lime kesilmeye, işkence çekmeye hatta ölmeye razı insanlar tanıyacaksın. Umarım onlardan biri olursun. Ancak özgürlük adına işkence çekmekte olduğun anda bile onun gerçekte var olmadığını, olsa olsa sen onu aradığın sürece ve oranda var olduğunu anlayacaksın özgürlüğün. Bir düş gibi, doğmadan önceki yaşamının, özgür çünkü yapayalnız olduğun zamanın anısından doğmuş bir düşünce gibi.”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from Letter to a Child Never Born

“Io perfino nelle pause in cui piango suoi miei fallimenti, le mie delusioni, i miei strazi, concludo che soffrire sia da preferirsi al niente.”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from Letter to a Child Never Born

“Però il rimpianto esiste, e i legami esistono, radicati in noi come alberi che non cedono neanche all'uragano, inevitabili come la fame e la sete.
Non te ne puoi mai liberare, anche se ci provi con tutta la tua volontà, la tua logica. Magari credi di averli dimenticati e un giorno riaffiorano, irrimediabilmente, spietati, per metterti la corda al collo più di qualsiasi boia. E strozzarti.”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from Letter to a Child Never Born

“Non ho mai capito come faccia a ridere in quel modo: ma penso che sia perché ha pianto molto. Solo chi ha pianto molto può apprezzare la vita nelle sue bellezze, e ridere bene.”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from Letter to a Child Never Born

“Dünya değişir, ve hep aynı kalır.”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from Letter to a Child Never Born

“La guerra è un infanticidio in massa, rinviato di vent'anni.”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from Letter to a Child Never Born

“একজন পুরুষ মানে সম্মুখভাগে লেজবিশিষ্ট একটি মানুষ নয়- একজন পুরুষ মানে একজন ব্যক্তি।”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from Letter to a Child Never Born

“E' solo rispettando se stessi che si può esigere il rispetto degli altri, è solo credendo in se stessi che si può essere creduti dagli altri”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from Letter to a Child Never Born

“Non è vero che non credi all'amore, mamma. Ci credi tanto da straziarti perché ne vedi così poco, e perché quello che vedi non è mai perfetto. Tu sei fatta d'amore. Ma è sufficiente credere all'amore se non si crede alla vita?”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from Letter to a Child Never Born

“...]neanche per un uomo la vita é facile, sai. Poiché‚ avrai muscoli più saldi, ti chiederanno di portare fardelli più pesi, ti imporranno arbitrarie responsabilità Poiché‚ avrai la barba, rideranno se tu piangi e perfino se hai bisogno di tenerezza Poiché‚ avrai una coda davanti, ti ordineranno di uccidere o essere ucciso alla guerra ed esigeranno la tua complicità per tramandare la tirannia che instaurarono nelle caverne. Eppure, o proprio per questo, essere un uomo sarà un'avventura altrettanto meravigliosa: un'impresa che non ti deluderà mai. Almeno lo spero perché‚, se nascerai uomo, spero che sarai un uomo come io l'ho sempre sognato: dolce coi deboli, feroce coi prepotenti, generoso con chi ti vuol bene, spietato con chi ti comanda.”
― Oriana Fallaci, quote from Letter to a Child Never Born

About the author

Popular quotes

“The smell was that of a sewer under an abattoir.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Look to Windward

“she seemed to be moving forward into the future, while I, unable to follow, was left with my sameness.”
― Truman Capote, quote from The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories

“A proper lady should be able to smile pretty, wear sequins like she means it, and kick a man's ass nine ways from Sunday while wearing stiletto heels. If she can't do that much, she's not trying hard enough. —Francis Brown”
― Seanan McGuire, quote from Discount Armageddon

“Her bones were of bronze and her sinews of the ancient elms, and her eyes were like the sky, wide and daring.”
― Kahlil Gibran, quote from Jesus the Son of Man

“Oklahoma holds ancient power within its red dirt,”
― P.C. Cast, quote from Redeemed

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.