My mother was my first jealous lover.

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.

Desire creates its own object.

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.

There are no original ideas. There are only original people.

Silence is the garment of light.

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