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 best work is a fusion of love and praise.

truth ... is the first casualty of tyranny.

The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.

If there is one lesson Rome teaches, it is that matter is good; in Rome the holy and the homely rise and converge.

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

I don't think I know a single woman who knows what she looks like.