Knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather. ... When it comes to knowing, the senses are more honest than the intelligence. Nothing is more real than the first wall you lean up against sobbing with exhaustion. Rome no more than beheld (that is, taken in through the eyes only) could still be a masterpiece in cardboard - the eye I suppose being of all the organs the most easily infatuated and then jaded and so tricked. Seeing is pleasure, but not knowledge.

But to be quite oneself one must first waste a little time.

Everything is very quiet, the streets are never crowded, and the people one dislikes are out of town.

Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.

I pity people who do not care for Society. They are poorer for the oblation they do not make.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.

One's sentiments -- call them that -- one's fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or, worse still, when one betrays them does one realize their power.