All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

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

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

truth ... is the first casualty of tyranny.

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.

To surrender one's vulnerable body to water has always seemed to me a limpid act of will that has no coutnerpart or equal, unless it is sex.

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.