Some of these teen-aged innocent angels were consummate experts in the diabolical arts of keeping a boy, or a number of boys at the same time, in a frenzied state of hopeful uncertainty.

They eat the dainty food of famous chefs with the same pleasure with which they devour gross peasant dishes, mostly composed of garlic and tomatoes, or fisherman's octopus and shrimps, fried in heavily scented olive oil on a little deserted beach.

Public and private food in America has become eatable, here and there extremely good. Only the fried potatoes go on unchanged, as deadly as before.

Most of them were as unaware of their breathtaking beauty as wild animals; they seemed as tranquil and unself-conscious as deer in a forest, but who chewed gum instead of grass.

Who in Europe could have thought of the disappearing bed, a bed during the night, a handsome wardrobe during the day? Where else [than in the United States] could the rocking chair have been invented, in which a man could move and sit still at the same time?

Italians have discovered America for the Americans; taught poetry, statesmanship, and the ruses of trade to the English; military art to the Germans; cuisine to the French; acting and ballet dancing to the Russians; and music to everybody.

The varieties of spoken American could not be counted, and most of them were incomprehensible to me, used as I was to the clean-cut pronunciation of Italian.

I myself spent hours in the Columbia library as intimidated and embarrassed as a famished gourmet invited to a dream restaurant where every dish from all the world's cuisines, past and present, was available on request.

It was difficult for me to distinguish one class from another [in America], everybody looked middle-class in European eyes, including the black students in the university and the beggars in the street.

I could never become accustomed to American mothers' reckless disregard for their daughters' moral welfare.