Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

I love cloisters, which are the architectural equivalent of a theological concept: perfect freedom within set boundaries.

Children hold us hostage; they represent our commitment to the future.

It's the perpetually unfinished quality of housework that makes it oppressive - it never ends, like bad psychoanalysis, or a dream interrupted. It is paradoxically true that it is exactly this daily re-creation of the world that lends housekeeping its nobility and romance.

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

Silence is the garment of light.

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.