Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.

The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.

She had one of those charming faces which, according to the angle from which you see them, look either melancholy or impertinent. Her eyes were grey; her trick of narrowing them made her seem to reflect, the greater part of the time, in the dusk of her second thoughts. With that mood, that touch of arriere pensee, went an uncertain, speaking set of lips.

Sacrificers are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those they sacrifice.

Imagination of my kind is most caught, most fired, most worked upon by the unfamiliar: I have thrivenon the changes and chances, the dislocations andcontrasts which have made up so much of my life.

Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.

The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect.