“If you love life you also love the past, because it is the present as it has survived in memory." Translation by David Downie”

“That mysterious play which extends from love of a body to a love of an entire person has seemed to me noble enough to consecrate to it one part of my life.”

“I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.”

“Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul...”

“Quel bel levriero... si distese sulla mia vita (Memorie di Adriano, Saeculum Aureum)”

“The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their neglect.”

“The landscape of my days appears to be composed, like mountainous regions, of varied materials heaped up pell-mell. There I see my nature, itself composite, made up of equal parts of instinct and training. Here and there protrude the granite peaks of the inevitable, but all about is rubble from the landslips of chance. I strive to retrace my life to find in it some plan, following a vein of lead, or of gold, or the course of some subterranean stream, but such devices are only tricks of perspective in the memory.”