Desire creates its own object.
Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.
There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.
The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.
Women’s propensity to share confidences is universal. We confirm our reality by sharing.
The past is a sorry country.
The past can be tamed and controlled.
If there is one lesson Rome teaches, it is that matter is good; in Rome the holy and the homely rise and converge.
All is waiting and all is work; all is change and all is permanence.
I made the mistake of thinking that if you add up the past, you sum up the future; I forgot how frequently life astonishes us.
Italians do not regard food as merely fuel. They regard it as medicine for the soul, one of life’s abiding pleasures.
In memory Venice is always magic.
Italy offers one the most priceless of all one’s possessions – one’s own soul.
Persecution always acts as a jell for members of cults; it proves to them, in the absence of history, liturgy, tradition, and doctrine, that they are God’s chosen.
Silence is the garment of light.
The best work is a fusion of love and praise.
Weather creates character.
Violence is its own anesthetist. The numbness it induces feels very much like calm.
Unhappiness makes beggars or accountants of us all.
One feels a quickening of the pulse when one crosses a border.