Status Updates From Four Seasons in Rome

To live is to make leavings. Hair, dust, trash, children, love letters, old shoes, bones.

That's the miracle of writing, the place you try to find - when the room, your body, and even time itself cooperate in a vanishing act.

This, I suppose, is what it means to look after two babies: any attempt to make you feel as if you were at the center of something is hopelessly hilarious.

You find your way through a place by getting lost in it.

I had to abandon this one at about two-thirds of the way through. I didn’t realise that this book was not current. It predates some of his classics by at least a decade. That helps me feel a little less harsh about it, but it’s really just dreadfully boring to be honest. Guy moves to Italy with his wife and two infant sons and has fairly mundane observations about living in another country and raising two kids.

Maybe being a new parent is like moving to a foreign country.

There is a circle of understanding, an unspoken fellowship, between parents of multiple babies.

Is this what it means to be a parent - to constantly fail to be in control of anything?

I'm thankful that everything sweet is sweet because it is finite.

To be a nonfluent foreigner is to pass through one gate only to find yourself outside two more.