In a life, or a portion of a life illuminated, there's a fullness and a balance that no theory or abstraction can match. Why do people waste so much time on abstraction? The life that is given to us,...
If your faith is genuine, then you meet your responsibilities, fulfill your obligations, and wait until you are found. It will come. If not to you, then to your children, and if not to them, then to t...
How, in good conscience, Alessandro asked, can you ride across the countryside in perfect safety, as if you were on holiday, stopping mainly to swim and eat oysters, while men are crushed and pulveriz...
He wanted more than anything in the world to embrace her. But it seemed out of the question. Then she turned to him and stretched out her arms. And he went to her as if he had been born for it.
He thought only of one thing--the geometries before him. Here was God speaking in His simple absolute language, according to the same grammar that He had used to start the planets on their smooth and...
He paused. Perhaps he had a son. He intoned their names, and then he said, I sentence you to death. The sentence shall be carried out by firing squad, at the customary time, in the execution yard of t...
For what can be imagined more beautiful than the sight of a perfectly just city rejoicing in justice alone.
For someone who is happy, celebration is yet another channel or instrument through which happiness may course. For someone who is not, celebration is a tedious parody of existence that seems pointless...
Win. Spit in their eye, Evelyn had said, cheerfully but with the tranquil acceptance of her own fate. Defiance, Catherine, is a gift of God, who is superior to nature. When nature comes to get you, ho...
The intellect is of no use unless it's disciplined by the mortification of the flesh, so that it may serve the soul.
Strength floods in after a fall.
And even when I was broken the way sometimes one can be broken, and even though I had fallen, I found upon arising that I was stronger than before, that the glories, if I may call them that, which I h...
You're crazy, Ludovico announced. Alessandro held his finger in the air. Ah! he said, but at least I'm able to tell you my last name, and at least, when they take me out to the stake my dreams may be...
You don’t do things by halves. If you love a woman, you love her entirely. You give everything. You don’t spend your time in cafes; you don’t make love to other women; you don’t take her for granted....
When your parents die, Alessandro, you feel that you have betrayed them.Why? Luciana asked. Because you come to love your children more. I lost my mother and father to images in photographs and handwr...
They were already in love and both of them knew it, but for both it was too fast.
They danced on the shore in marvelous, civilized, humorous reels in which the old contributed wit when they could not contribute grace, and the young listened to their elders, who told them in their d...
Then the bow orchestra began to play an apocalyptically beautiful canon, one of those pieces in which, surely, the composer simply transcribed what was given, and trembled in awe of the hand that was...
Then in the darkness and purity of the meadows he began to feel that the world had many secrets, that they were shattering even to glimpse or sense, and that they were not necessarily unpleasant. In c...
The more perfect something is, the less it can be loved -- like a face, a body, voice, tone, color, or music itself. In playing a piece, don't strive for perfection: it will kill the piece in that it...