The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.
Nothing is more democratic, less judgmental, than water. Water doesn’t care whether flesh is withered or fresh; it caresses aged flesh and firm flesh with equal love.
All our loves are contained in all our other loves.
One can be tired of Rome after three weeks and feel one has exhausted it; after three months one feels that one has not even scratched the surface of Rome; and after six months one wishes never to leave it.
The dream police will not let me have sexual fantasies.
What you desire you call into being...
Children hold us hostage; they represent our commitment to the future.
How do you think it would feel to be obliged to ask for a seat-belt extender on an airplane? For the unfashionably bulgy, life is a series of small humiliations.
Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people.
To live exhilaratingly in and for the moment is deadly serious work, fun of the most exhausting sort.
There is something worse than dying, and that is humiliation – at least so it seemed to me...
In the face of evil, detachment is a dubious virtue.
Facts mean nothing to wounded feelings...
Insanity is a lack of proportion.
Every generation reinvents the wheel – and in the process it often adds to rather than subtracts from a woman’s burdens.
It’s the perpetually unfinished quality of housework that makes it oppressive – it never ends, like bad psychoanalysis, or a dream interrupted. It is paradoxically true that it is exactly this daily re-creation of the world that lends housekeeping its nobility and romance.
There are places one comes home to that one has never been to...
Every house we have lived in, every building to which our hands have lent their work, belongs to us by virtue of love or of regret.
Great unhappiness is incompatible with the belief that it will ever end.
Food is my drug of choice.
Kindness and intelligence don’t always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.