Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

The land belongs to the future.

When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open.

A group of girls with their hair hanging loose over their shoulders, and the most strident voices imaginable, sold flowers at the foot of an equestrian statue, done in bronze by Thornycroft when the Empress was a young woman.

Oh, that's the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.

In a few hours one could cover that incalculable distance; from the winter country and homely neighbours, to the city where the air trembled like a tuning-fork with unimaginable possibilities.

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything
that can ever happen to one again.

Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole -- so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

You must pray for him, my child. It is to such as he that our Blessed Mother comes nearest.

The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.

One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome.

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.

The air and the earth interpenetrated in the warm gusts of spring; the soil was full of sunlight, and the sunlight full of red dust. The air one breathed was saturated with earthy smells, and the grass under foot had a reflection of the blue sky in it.

The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me. In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions... I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen again.

The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death.

The world is always full of brilliant youth which fades into grey and embittered middle age: the first flowering takes everything. The great men are those who have developed slowly, or who have been able to survive the glamour of their early florescence and to go on learning from life.

This land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.

Here, I felt, winter brought no desolation; it was tamed, like a polar bear led on a leash by a beautiful lady.