History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts: it has flowed forward. Rome is a ...continuity, called "eternal." What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather.... When i...t comes to knowing, the senses are more honest than the intelligence. Nothing is more real than the first wall you lean up against sobbing with exhaustion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[holds her by the hand, silent] O mother, mother! What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope,... The gods look down, and this unnatural scene They laugh at. O my mother, mother! O! You have won a happy victory to Rome; But, for your son, believe it--O, believe it-- Most dangerously you have with him prevailed, If not most mortal to him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most. It is older than the oldest speech of Rome.... This is the tragic accent of the scene.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »