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

The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.

Porches are America’s lost rooms.

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.

I love cloisters, which are the architectural equivalent of a theological concept: perfect freedom within set boundaries.

Italians’ relationship to food is loving, informal, and gay.

Food is my drug of choice.

What you desire you call into being.

it’s perfectly possible to hate one’s fat and to love one’s body at the same time.

Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

Beware of people carrying ideas. Beware of ideas carrying people.

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.

There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.

to have a crisis, and act upon it, is one thing. To dwell in perpetual crisis is another.

Collecting is like sex; satisfaction renews and creates new appetites.

Rome is all things high and low. It is like God, it accommodates so much.

In memory Venice is always magic.

Larry Grobel has the illness of all writers, he can’t help himself.

People who have severe mental illness are in Hell. People who have lost a loved one are in Hell.

One day some people came to the master and asked: How can you be happy in a world of such impermanence, where you cannot protect your loved ones from harm, illness or death?

Construct well being or produce illness in your self.

We have hearts that are capable of experiencing great love, but sometimes they get broken.

I have suffered from depression for most of my life. It is an illness.

Both childbirth and abortion are medical procedures but neither is an illness, and sometimes they’re both treated as such.

At whatever time highly skilled physicians shall have developed the healing of illnesses by means of foods, and shall make provision for simple foods, and shall prohibit humankind from living as slaves to their lustful appetites.