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

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

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

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.

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

To offer the complexities of life as an excuse for not addressing oneself to the simpler, more manageable (trivial) aspects of daily existence is a perversity often indulged in by artists, husbands, intellectuals -- and critics of the Women's Movement.

To sleep is an act of faith.