My old friend has gained weight. His shirt is wrinkled and his hair is too long. We clamp hands on each other and trade kisses on the cheek, holding on longer than we should, because as the distance has grown, so has the enthusiasm of our greetings. Someday we will be the greatest of strangers.

People lie. People disagree. People make mistakes. To find out the truth, you have to know how to search for it.

Leanoardo wrote that a painter should begin every canvas wit a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light. Most painters do the opposite, starting with a whitewash and adding the shadows last. But Paul, who knows Leonardo so well you’d thing the old man slept on the bottom bun, understands the value of starting with the shadows. The only things people can ever know about you are the ones you let them see.

Inde fernut, titidem qui vivere debeat annos, corpre de patrio parvum phenica renasci’ It’s from Ovid. It means, ‘A little phoenix is born anew from the father’s body, fated to live the same number of years.

Life has taught this boy to string nets beneath his hopes.

His intelligence was relentless and wild, a fire even he couldn’t control. It swallowed entire books at a sitting, finding flaws in arguments, gaps in evidence, errors in interpretation, in objects, far from his own.

Two people who think they’re in love can find out, when left alone, exactly how little they know about each other.

When God became human, He made Himself into an image. By His own incarnation, He shattered the prohibition against art.

I’d begun to realize that there was an unspoken predjudice among book-learned people, a secret conviction they all seemed to share, that life as we know it is an imperfect vision of reality, and that only art, like a pair of reading glasses can correct it.

A Greek has twenty-five centuries of painful history to keep is dreams in check, but there’s nothing more dangerous than to give an American hope.