If you love a man for his honesty, you cannot become angry when he shows it.
How do ugly men make their way through life?
He spends the night in prayer. God’s voice, through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, tells him what the politician in him already knows: that whatever he might stand to gain from playing one ag...
What was once the language of secrecy is now the language of power.
Together he [Girolamo Savonarola] and his archenemy Lorenzo [de' Medici] would have been the stuff of gargoyles. One could almost imagine the diptych in which their profiles confronted each other, the...
She has always felt safe inside his arms, this beautiful, powerful elder brother, whom so many fear but who has always been as tender as a lover with her.
It is the ones who keep you in thrall to more than their snatches who command the houses and the gowns to go with them. And for that they have first to love themselves.
Either you’re standing under your halos, eyes up to heaven, or you’re munching apples in their faces and flashing your bush. I’m not even sure they know which they prefer. The best you can do is choos...
A young woman seeks sanctuary with us. It is not for us to deny her that right. Tell His Holiness that we will protect her with our lives and care for her until she is ready to leave. Not even Alexand...
You draw(the painter)
This then is Borgia Rome: a city where a traveler entering the gates must still cross acres of country before he reaches the center, where animals still outnumber citizens, goats and cattle grazing th...
There have been none like us before. And there will be none afterwards. Be careful what you write.
Obsessed? I don't know what the word means. I know there were times when I couldn't think of anything else. I used to stay in every weeknight in the hope that he might get free and call me. It felt li...
It was so cold. In the monastery. Sometimes the wind came from the sea with ice in it... It could freeze the skin off your face. Once the snow was so deep we couldn't get out of the doors to the woods...
I listen to people talking sometimes, that great river that is language, with all its undercurrents of grammar and nuance, and I wonder how we all learn so quickly to speak it, given that we begin whe...
I know what she is thinking. That she will never have those feelings. And she wants to have them. Oh, how much she wants to...I have seen it before, the way women yearn more for a child when they have...
Family. The greatest loyalty after God.
Everyone that exalteth himself shall be humbled, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted And she had tried, truly and honestly, tried so hard that sometimes, despite the nun’s kindness and patie...
Either you’re standing under your haloes, eyes up to heaven, or you’re munching apples in their faces and flashing your bush. I’m not even sure they know which one they prefer. The best you can do is...
As the last chimes die away, a series of contorted male shrieks rise up from somewhere nearby; a late coupling between the sheets or a few early knife thrusts into a belly? He smiles. Such are the sou...