Nothing is more democratic, less judgmental, than water. Water doesn't care whether flesh is withered or fresh; it caresses aged flesh and firm flesh with equal love.

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.

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.

Collecting is like sex; satisfaction renews and creates new appetites.

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.

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

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