We accumulate pain, collect it. ... We display it, stack it up into a pile, then we stack it up into a mountain, so we can climb up onto it, waiting for or demanding sympathy: "Hey, do you see how big my pain is?"

Some people are born empty. All manner of good deeds and patience and loving kindness can't even begin to fill them up.

We believed the fairy tales we told our children and we loved them beyond reason even when we were green and bungling about it. We were children loving our children. And that's who we are still.

Sicily could only be an island, less by the caprice of nature than by her own insolence. As though she might have quit Italy had she not already been born separate from it.

Gauntlets are the stuff of every life, but when you learn young how to pick them up, how to work them against the demons, and finally how to outlast if not escape those same demons, life can seem more merciful. It's that long, smooth, false swanning through life that seems to drive a person, sooner or later, into the wall.

Our babies cried when we left them and we cry when they leave us. Echoes. Proud almost to arrogance then, we pushed them about in their carriages. Dutifully, wearily now they push us about in our chairs.

Take my hand and grow young with me. Don't rush. Don't sleep. Be a beginner. Light the candles. Keep the fire. Dare to love someone. Tell yourself the truth. Stay inside the rapture.