To my taste, the men in Rome are ridiculously, hurtfully, stupidly beautiful. More beautiful even than Roman women, to be honest. Italian men are beautiful in the same way as French women, which is to say-- no detail spared in the quest for perfection. They’re like show poodles. Sometimes they look so good I want to applaud.

You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings.

I will not harbor unhealthy thoughts anymore.

The trick at every turn was to endure the test of living for as long as possible. The odds of survival were punishingly slim, for the world was naught by a school of calamity and an endless burning furnace of tribulation. But those who survived the world shaped it--even as the world, simultaneously, shaped them.

It has never been easy for me to understand why people work so hard to create something beautiful, but then refuse to share it with anyone, for fear of criticism.

The beauty and variety of the natural world are merely the visible legacies of endless war.

There is no choice more intensely personal, after all, than whom you choose to marry; that choice tells us, to a large extent, who you are.