I learned that if you love a boy you are no longer free. The boy may become more important than your own self and if it is so, you will find trouble there. The first time you are hurt in your heart, you do not forget the lesson. It stays forever.

When a person you love moves by you with flat eyes that will not see you, it is a shock to believe it.

...it occurred to her how some people continued through no design of one's own to be in one's life while others might initially enter in a sort of blaze and seem to change everything but then might not stay around.

Change and renewal are themes in life, arent they? We keep growing throughout life.

There are aspects of love that I once undervalued. Kindness. Having a sort of honor when love is on the table.

[The director's idea for the film was:] A young American or English girl goes to Tuscany to visit English expatriates. She is on a mission to lose her virginity. That's a mission easily accomplished, if that's the only mission. The story had to be more complicated than that. Because there is so little happening dramatically, there had to be something to keep you curious.

Off the packed trail we experience the miracle of corn snow, skiing atop the crust, like skiing on an eggshell that has been sprinkled with sugar.