All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

Violence is its own anesthetist. The numbness it induces feels very much like calm.

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.

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).

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

Facts mean nothing to wounded feelings.

Unhappiness makes beggars or accountants of us all.