There are no inanimate objects.

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.

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.

Grief does not end and love does not die and nothing fills its graven place. With grace, pain is transmuted into the gold of wisdom and compassion and the lesser coin of muted sadness and resignation; but something leaden of it remains, to become the kernel arond which more pain accretes (a black pearl): one pain becomes every other pain ... unless one strips away, one by one, the layers of pain to get to the heart of the pain - and this causes more pain, pain so intense as to feel like evisceration.

All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

Silence is the garment of light.

the islands of Italy combine all the elements - fire, water, earth, and air - and that is irresistible.