History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts; it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.

...the power-loving temperament is more dangerous when it either prefers or is forced to operate in what is materially a void. Wehave everything to dread from the dispossessed.

The passion of vanity has its own depths in the spirit, and is powerfully militant.

Two things are terrible in childhood: helplessness (being in other people's power) and apprehension - the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told.

Curiosity in Rome is a form of courtesy.

[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.

There's something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it's a grandiose form of funk.