The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

New things are always ugly.

People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.

The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.

This is reality, whether you like it or not--all those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.

I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered –about her teeth for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things she had lost, *but whose inner glow has faded*. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.