“First of all, let's get one thing straight. Your Italy and our Italia are not the same thing. Italy is a soft drug peddled in predictable packages, such as hills in the sunset, olive groves, lemon trees, white wine, and raven-haired girls. Italia, on the other hand, is a maze. It's alluring, but complicated. It's the kind of place that can have you fuming and then purring in the space of a hundred meters, or in the course of ten minutes. Italy is the only workshop in the world that can turn out both Botticellis and Berlusconis.”
― La Bella Figura: A Field Guide to the Italian Mind
― La Bella Figura: A Field Guide to the Italian Mind
“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― The Four Loves
― The Four Loves
“It enclosed us in its laceries as we watched the moon spill across the Atlantic like wine from an overturned glass. With the light all around us, we felt secret in that moon-infused water like pearls forming in the soft tissues of oysters.”
― Beach Music
― Beach Music
“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”
― Walden and Other Writings
― Walden and Other Writings
Nancy’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Nancy’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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