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

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.

One feels a quickening of the pulse when one crosses a border.

Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

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.

To live exhilaratingly in and for the moment is deadly serious work, fun of the most exhausting sort

In the face of evil, detachment is a dubious virtue.

Italians do not regard food as merely fuel. They regard it as medicine for the soul, one of life’s abiding pleasures.

There are no inanimate objects.

To offer the complexities of life as an excuse for not addressing oneself to the simpler, more manageable (trivial) aspects of daily existence is a perversity often indulged in by artists, husbands, intellectuals — and critics of the Women’s Movement.

To surrender one’s vulnerable body to water has always seemed to me a limpid act of will that has no coutnerpart or equal, unless it is sex.

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.

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.

When you’re going through a period of unhappiness, a broken love affair, the death of someone you love, or some other disorder in your life, then you have no refuge but writing.

The only thing blame does is to keep the focus off you when you are looking for… reasons to explain your unhappiness or frustration.

Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.

One of our major flaws, and causes of unhappiness, is that we find it hard to take note of appreciate and be grateful for what is always around us. We suffer because we lose sight of the value of what is before us and yearn, often unfairly, for the imagined attraction elsewhere.

Unhappiness comes from mirrors. Happiness comes from windows.

It’s not what isn’t, it’s what you wish was that makes unhappiness.

Many of our disappointments and much of our unhappiness arise from our forming false notions of things and persons.

If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life. You will be evading your own capacities, your own possibilities.