..if you put people on a diet, they start thinking about food. Or if you make someone stop smoking, all they think about is cigarettes. It seems logical enough to me that if you tell a person he can't have sex, he's going to be obsessive about the subject. Then to give him the power to tell other people how to run their sex lives, well, that's just asking for trouble. In a way, it's like having a blind person teach Art History, isn't it?

I raised my hand and asked if God was a spirit. And he said yes, He was. So I asked if it was right that a spirit was different from a person because it didn't have a body, wasn't material. And when he agreed, I asked how, if God was a spirit, He could be a man, if He didn't have a body or anything.

Guilo, although a lawyer, never lied; at least not to his friends.

Though everyone in the bar knew who he was, no one asked him about the death, though one old man did rustle his newspaper suggestively.

Perception of personal danger very often set people on the path of virtue.

Her mask gave no sign of how this affected her.

Most people — however much they might deny it — had an idea of what they were getting into when they got into it.

And off in the far distance, the gold on the wings of the angel atop the bell tower of San Marco flashed in the sun, bathing the entire city in its glistening benediction.

Oh, so seldom does fate cast our enemy into our hands, to do with as we will

We buy things. We wear them or put them on our walls, or sit on them, but anyone who wants to can take them away from us. Or break them....Long after he's dead, someone else will own those stupid little boxes, and then someone after him, just as someone owned them before he did. But no one ever thinks of that: objects survive us and go on living. It's stupid to believe we own them. And it's sinful for them to be so important.

She became his Ariadne, leading him through the labyrinth of books, stopping now and then to pass another one to him.

You really love to gossip, don't you?” he asked, wishing she had brought him a glass of wine.“Yes, I suppose I do,” she answered, sounding surprised at the realization. “You think that's why I love reading novels so much?