“Remain true to yourself, child. If you know your own heart, you will always have one friend who does not lie.”
“Rome was mud and smoky skies; the rank smell of the Tiber and the exotically spiced cooking fires of a hundred different nationalities. Rome was white marble and gilding and heady perfumes; the blare of trumpets and the shrieking of market-women and the eternal, sub-aural hum of more people, speaking more languages than Gaius had ever imagined existed, crammed together on seven hills whose contours had long ago disappeared beneath this encrustation if humanity. Rome was the pulsing heart of the world.”
“ A life path may have strange twists and turnings, and we do not always end up where we intend to go....”
“Men are by nature wanderers...Every people has moved from somewhere, and had to learn the ways of the land from the people who were there before.”
“Remain yourself, child. If you know your own heart, you will always find one friend who doesn't lie.”
“ They set down all their knowledge on bits of leather or waxed wood or tablets of stone and think that is wisdom. What good does it do a piece of stone to have knowledge?...know it is the understanding graven in the heart that makes men wise.”
“Funny thing, how people keep fighting about religion, when really it’s all the same. Seems to me it’s the priests who make all the problems; most folks just want good harvests and healthy babies, just trying to get along. If it’s not the cattle stampeding, it’s the priests haranguing the crowds.”
“You'll always love him" he said, as if he'd read her mind. "That doesn't die just because he did, or because you now love me. Your love for him is part of who you are. It's a beautiful part, Denise. Don't be sad of it, and I will never be jealous of it". Denise's eyes overflowed again. Spade was right.”
“as to our hopes, our dreams, our secret desires, we couldn't talk about those. They were to vague, too frightening, too important. And so they stayed inside us, growing like a cancer, a body eating away at itself. In retrospect I'm amazed how long our marriage lasted.”
“There is nothing that dulls a personality so much as a negative outlook.”
“I wait for the fist of devestation, the collapse of a year's worth of hopes, the roar of sadness. And I do feel it. The pain of losing him. Or the idea of him. But along with that pain is something else, something quiet at first, so I have to strain for it. but when I do, I hear the sound of a door quietly clicking shut. And then the most amazing thing happens: The night is calm, but I feel a rush of wind, as if a thousand other doors have just simultaneously flung open.
I give one last glance towards Willem. Then I turn to Wolfgang. "Finished," I say.
But I suspect the opposite is true. That really, I'm just beginning.”
“Everybody has a right to their own troubles.”
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