Kindness and intelligence don't always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.

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.

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

Kindness and intelligence don't always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships.

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).

Unhappiness makes beggars or accountants of us all.

There are places one comes home to that one has never been to.