“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.”

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.

Women’s propensity to share confidences is universal. We confirm our reality by sharing.

The real reason women fall in love abroad is not that they are free of domestic inhibitions but that they translate their love of stone and place into love of flesh. … Is this true?

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.

my love of water … is mingled with and almost indistinguishable from a fear of water (I can float in a vertical position – I enter a fugue state – but I cannot bear to bury my face in water).

the gardens of our childhood are all beautiful.

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.