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

Our awesome responsibility to ourselves, to our children, and to the future is to create ourselves in the image of goodness, because the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings.

The past is a sorry country.

I don’t think I know a single woman who knows what she looks like.

All our loves are contained in all our other loves.

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.

Unhappiness makes beggars or accountants of us all.

Children hold us hostage; they represent our commitment to the future.

[On Werner Erhard, founder of est:] If I wanted a new belief system, I’d choose to believe in God – He’s been in business longer than Werner, and He has better music.

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.

There are no inanimate objects.

Abiding in peace makes us a threat to any storm.

If we don’t help each other, who will?

It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself.

The law-givers and the law-abiding, the beginning and the end.

In addition to the pleasure of having the piece, there is a deep and abiding pleasure for me assembling something in my head