The real reason women fall in love abroad is not that they are free of domestic inhibitions but that they translate their love of stone and place int….

Silence is the garment of light..

Persecution always acts as a jell for members of cults; it proves to them, in the absence of history, liturgy, tradition, and doctrine, that they are….

Illness is regarded as a crime, and crime is regarded as illness..

Unhappiness makes beggars or accountants of us all..

To sleep is an act of faith..

To live exhilaratingly in and for the moment is deadly serious work, fun of the most exhausting sort.

The past can be tamed and controlled..

To surrender one's vulnerable body to water has always seemed to me a limpid act of will that has no coutnerpart or equal, unless it is sex..

What you desire you call into being..

my love of water ... is mingled with and almost indistinguishable from a fear of water (I can float in a vertical position - I enter a fugue state - ….

The past is a sorry country..

Kindness and intelligence don't always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is n….

Every generation reinvents the wheel - and in the process it often adds to rather than subtracts from a woman's burdens..

I love cloisters, which are the architectural equivalent of a theological concept: perfect freedom within set boundaries..

My mother was my first jealous lover..

to have a crisis, and act upon it, is one thing. To dwell in perpetual crisis is another..

Italy offers one the most priceless of all one's possessions - one's own soul..

Italians do not regard food as merely fuel. They regard it as medicine for the soul, one of life's abiding pleasures..

There are no inanimate objects..

I don't think I know a single woman who knows what she looks like..