Whatever I do I've always done not because I want something but to compensate for a loss, to bring about a balance, to create amends, to make things right.

The treasures of the earth were movement, courage, laughter and love.

To be mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been.

Words were all he knew; they possessed and overwhelmed him, as if they were a thousand white cats with whom he shared a one-room apartment.

To see the beauty of the world is to put your hands on lines that run uninterrupted through life and through death. Touching them is an act of hope, for perhaps someone on the other side, if there is another side, is touching them, too.

He knew very well that love could be like the most beautiful singing, that it could make death inconsequential, that it existed in forms so pure and strong that it was capable of reordering the universe. He knew this, and that he lacked it, and yet as he stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Venezia, watching diplomats file quietly out the gate, he was content, for he suspected that to command the profoundest love might in the end be far less beautiful a thing than to suffer its absence.

Truth is no rounder than a horse's eye.