Grief does not end and love does not die and nothing fills its graven place. With grace, pain is transmuted into the gold of wisdom and compassion and the lesser coin of muted sadness and resignation; but something leaden of it remains, to become the kernel arond which more pain accretes (a black pearl): one pain becomes every other pain ... unless one strips away, one by one, the layers of pain to get to the heart of the pain - and this causes more pain, pain so intense as to feel like evisceration.

Every generation reinvents the wheel - and in the process it often adds to rather than subtracts from a woman's burdens.

it's perfectly possible to hate one's fat and to love one's body at the same time.

All our loves are contained in all our other loves.

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

There is something worse than dying, and that is humiliation - at least so it seemed to me.

Grief does not end and love does not die and nothing fills its graven place. With grace, pain is transmuted into the gold of wisdom and compassion and the lesser coin of muted sadness and resignation; but something leaden of it remains, to become the kernel arond which more pain accretes (a black pearl): one pain becomes every other pain ... unless one strips away, one by one, the layers of pain to get to the heart of the pain - and this causes more pain, pain so intense as to feel like evisceration.