A benevolent act is like a locust: it sleeps until it is called.
The intellect is of no use unless it's disciplined by the mortification of the flesh, so that it may serve the soul.
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...
[When] he's here, he's always reading. He says books stop time. I myself think he's crazy...Don't tell anyone, but when he reads something that he likes he gets real happy, turns on the music, and dan...
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 want to be content with yourself. People who are, are insufferable, the walking dead. But you don't want to be entirely driven, either, because then you just skate over the world and never t...
What could be more lovely than writing a book about something you love?
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...
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...
The last time the Right Honourable Gentleman raised the accusation about the policies of this government forcing his constituents to resort to inedible foods—in that case, as I remember, it was ants,...
The greatest blizzards start with the finest snow.
The Parthenon is a pleasing building, and Mozart’s Fifth Piano Concerto a pleasing work, because each makes use of proportions, relations, and variations that go beyond subjective preference, educatio...
TO BE mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been.
She could hear in the traffic a white sound that threw veils across the present and allowed her to hold the scene to her the way that she held her own children—fighting time, conquered by it, ravished...
Shall I show you the half-dozen other rooms in this hospital where these scenes are repeated? And what of the other hospitals? Printing House Square is small and tame. Even in the private institutions...
Rome was not meant to move, but to be beautiful. The wind was supposed to be the fastest thing here, and the trees, bending and swaying, to slow it down. Now
Papa, Alessandro said, his eyes closing. She swims nude in the sea. She carries a pistol. And she wears perfume that makes me dizzy. Sometimes I go to the garden gate and smell the handle, because, wh...
One shouldn't ever do anything to protect one's dignity. You either have it or you don't.
Mrs. Gamely had gotten a letter through, inviting them to visit as soon as they could, and reporting that, in these years just before the millennium Lake of the Coheeries had had had hard winters--yes...
Marriages are made in heaven which is why they cause so much trouble on earth.