One can be tired of Rome after three weeks and feel one has exhausted it; after three months one feels that one has not even scratched the surface of Rome; and after six months one wishes never to leave it.

All our loves are contained in all our other loves.

The real reason women fall in love abroad is not that they are free of domestic inhibitions but that they translate their love of stone and place into love of flesh. ... Is this true?

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

All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

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.

How do you think it would feel to be obliged to ask for a seat-belt extender on an airplane? For the unfashionably bulgy, life is a series of small humiliations.