“Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people.”

All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

The dream police will not let me have sexual fantasies.

My mother was my first jealous lover.

Weather creates character.

Great unhappiness is incompatible with the belief that it will ever end.

I love medieval cities; they do not clamor for attention; they possess their souls – their riches – in quiet; formal, courteous, they reveal themselves slowly, stone by stone, garden by garden; hidden treasures wait calmly to be loved and yield to introspective wandering.

If there is one lesson Rome teaches, it is that matter is good; in Rome the holy and the homely rise and converge.

Illness is regarded as a crime, and crime is regarded as illness.

Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence.

Insanity is a lack of proportion.

The past can be tamed and controlled.

Every generation reinvents the wheel – and in the process it often adds to rather than subtracts from a woman’s burdens.

There are no original ideas. There are only original people.

Italy offers one the most priceless of all one’s possessions – one’s own soul.

Sometimes I think that just not thinking of oneself is a form of prayer. . .

the islands of Italy combine all the elements – fire, water, earth, and air – and that is irresistible.

The first lady in my life, but now you’re gone, I learned through the years to keep carrying on.

The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.