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

Italy offers one the most priceless of all one's possessions - one's own soul.

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

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.

My mother was my first jealous lover.

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

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.