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.

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.

Success is never so interesting as struggle

Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.

The sky was a midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an invisible current.

The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.

It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.

Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.

Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.

The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

The end is nothing; the road is all.

Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core.

We spent our lives making livings.

Sometimes your mind can imprison your body and can put your body under some constraints. There is only one way for your body to be free: To free your mind!

Beauty, happiness, they're things so big they can't capture them with their scientific words. It's like what they used to call magic.

If the gift of God is for personal use and gain, God would have used it personally

Schizophrenia beats dining alone.

The music business can be very cold. And it doesn't honor its elders.

You can do anything you want, as long as it works.

Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.

As women, we must speak out, speak up, say no to our inheritance of loss and yes to a future of women-led dialogue about women's rights and value.