(25) "…and it would feel as if tethers were falling away, and the two of us were gently rising, through the glass, through the trees, through interweaving layers of atmosphere, into whatever was beyond the sky."
(31) "…the skin from a ball of mozzarella cheese tastes rich enough to change my life."
"We interview another babysitter, an Australian girl who says she is here in Rome 'to party.' Then we hire Tacy."
(37)"Pliny whispers in my ear, 'Different days pass verdict on different men and only the last day a final verdict on all men; and consequently no day is to be trusted.'"
(48) "I'm thankful that everything sweet is sweet because it is finite."
(53) "The mind craves ease; it encourages the senses to recognize symbols, to gloss. It makes maps of our kitchen drawers and neighborhood streets; it fashions a sort of algebra out of life. And this is useful, even essential…without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We'd pass out every time we saw -- actuallysaw-- a flower. Imagine if we only got to see a cumulonimbus cloud or Cassiopeia or a snowfall once a century: there'd be pandemonium in the streets. People would lie by the thousands in the fields on their backs."
(54) "'Habitualization…devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war.' …Over time, we stop perceiving familiar things -- words, friends, apartments -- as they truly are. To eat a banana for the thousandth time is nothing like eating a banana for the first time. To have sex with somebody for the thousandth time is nothing like having sex with that person for the first time. The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not careful, pretty soon we're gazing at our lives as if through a burlap sack."
"Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience -- buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello -- become new all over again."
(70) "I blink, I breathe; the spines of the books around me seethe and rustle, each a chronicle of someone's mind, a brain that has washed into this city like a wave and broken itself against it."
(75) [A single cubic centimeter of dirt might contain as much as two thousand meters of hyphae.] "Rome is like that, I think. The bulk of it lies underground, its history ramified so densely under there, ten centuries in every thimbleful, that no one will ever unravel it all."
(79) [On 100,000 people drowning in the tsunami] "A hundred thousand. Half the population of Boise. Is that everybody I know? Everybody I've ever met? Even one hundred thousand is too big to fully understand."
"To see our planet from space, you'd never know about all our human dramas, all these desperations being played out in our deserts and forests and wetlands, the earth a tinderbox of sage and cheatgrass, thirty tectonic plates floating atop an asthenosphere of half-melted asphalt. The bright flares of human desires, the endless, unsympathetic swirling of oblivion. Here's another duality of Rome: the way time here feels simultaneously immense and tiny."
(80) "Fate is whimsy: I could be you, reading this page; you could be on a breakwater in Sri Lanka, or making dinner in your house in Pompeii, laughing with your daughter, five minutes left to live. Everywhere the world reminds us how little control we have, the wind tearing through your jacket, a cluster of bacteria hiding in your hamburger."
(83) [Chagrin of hearing American tourists in Rome]
(97) [The miracle of writing]
(104) " 'There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.' "
(108) [The mystery, wonder, and limitations of life in Pliny's day]
(111) "Henry and Owen see more images in a day than Pliny saw in a lifetime, and I worry their generation will have to work a bit harder than every previous one tostay alert to the miracles of the world."
(123) "Italians will stop anything for pleasure. And the longer we're here, the more we feel he's right. Espresso, silk pajamas, a five-minute kiss; the sleekest, thinnest cell phone; extremely smooth leather. Truffles. Yachts. Four hour dinners."
(125) "I agree to live now, live as sweetly as I can, to fill my clothes with wind and my eyes with lights, but I understand I'll have to leave in the end."
(140) "We came to Rome because we'd always regret it if we didn't, because every timidity eventually turns into regret."
(141) [What is Rome?]
(154) "Not-knowing is always more thrilling than knowing. Not-knowing is where hope and art and possibility and invention come from. It is not-knowing, that old, old thing, that allows everything to be renewed."
"Every story seeks, in Emerson's words, the 'invisible and imponderable.' Faith, loss, emotional contact."
(182) [The foundations of language]
(184) [The love for your kids]
(186) "The world is not a pageant: beauty is as unquantifiable as love. Geography is not something that can be ranked."
[The beauty of life: why?]
"…then why does the world bother to be so astoundingly, intricately, breathtakingly beautiful?"
(199) [Becoming what we do]
(200) "Going home, I think, will be like waking up from a long and complicated dream, when you realize you are in your bedroom and everything around you is as it was but now slightly unfamiliar, and maybe slightly disappointing, too."
"Roma, they say,non basta una vita. One life is not enough."