She was a desperate woman with frailties just like her, temptations just like her, a woman who had needs, a woman who loved almost to the point of there being no more her anymore, a woman who probably cried too much, just like her, a woman afraid, wanting to believe rather than believing [...]

Before this I had always held back, had never lived freely, not with Pietro, not even with Palmira, but here, where nothing was known, I did not fear judgment, and because Father and I shared the same sensibilities, all the rigidness of my living melted and I felt myself coming into myself. If it was genuine, if it would last, it was a wonderful feeling.

If you feel joy when you do something unselfish for him, and would just as soon do it in secret as openly, then that rings of the true metal

She thought of all the people in all the paintings she had seen that day, not just Father's, in all the paintings of the world, in fact. Their eyes, the particular turn of a head, their loneliness or suffering or grief was borrowed by an artist to be seen by other people throughout the years who would never see them face to face. People who would be that close to her, she thought, a matter of a few arms' lengths, looking, looking, and they would never know her.

It was strange: When you reduced even a fledgling love affair to its essentials - I loved her, she maybe loved me, I was foolish, I suffered - it became vacuous and trite, meaningless to anyone else. In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments.