Status Updates From The Last Supper: A Summer i...

“But first and foremost [Italian cuisine] is kind to children. Consider the pizza: all around the world the pizza has come to represent the deepest forms of security known to the human palate. It is like a smiling face: it assuages the fear of complexity by showing everything on its surface.”

“In our first week here I found [my daughter] sobbing in her bed, missing her home and the girl she calls her best friend; and I was smitten by guilt and a feeling of wrongdoing, a feeling that I was not, myself, sufficiently adult to have imposed by destiny in another. But she is my daughter: our destinies are better off intertwined.”

“I have understood, I think, Piero’s message, though its tidings are not of joy. It is at once more rational than joy and more beautiful. It is that you must seek a truth that lies beyond human concerns. I keep this with me as the days pass. The white birds on the water; the light slanting through the window. The man rising from his tomb, full of terrible knowledge.”

“I think of how fortunate it is that there is a word—holiday—which not only explains the experience of going to bed in strange rooms but decrees it to be pleasurable.”

“I never found much art in daily things. There was always too much reality, churning just ahead, mixing everything together into a gray, agitated mass. It was only in writing that I could separate them again, and distinguish the bad from the good.”

Çocuklar bir süre heyecan içindeler. (...) Yanlarından defalarca geçtikleri her gruba bir miktar ilgi gösteriyorlar; olta atan balıkçı gibi sallıyorlar bakışlarını; insanlara bir fırsat veriyor, açık kapı gösteriyorlar. Onlar için hayatın esas muamması bu, anlıyorum: Olayların nasıl geliştiği.