Quotes by Italian Authors - Page 15

Dear girl with the red scarf,People will come and go in our lives. Most of them we won’t give a second thought to as soon as the door closes behind them. But I had always imagined that you would leave the deepest, everlasting mark.-Mr. Universe.
Maria La Serra
She was magic, a direct light—the kind that seeps through in places that didn’t exist inside him anymore. The light he thought he lost forever, but Nick realized we don’t lose the light, we absorb it, and with Olivia he wanted to absorb every small speck of it.
Maria La Serra
He stood there watching for a moment, not able to move. Even with her mascara running down her face and her hair beginning to frizz, she was still by far the most beautiful girl he’d ever laid eyes on. It was quite simple, wasn’t it? This great affection he had for Olivia was so overwhelming he chose to walk away instead of being brutally honest with himself.
Maria La Serra
Monsters don’t exist. It’s men you should be afraid of, not monsters.
Niccolò Ammaniti
An uncertain evil causes anxiety because, at the bottom of one's heart, one goes on hoping till the last moment that it may not be true; a certain evil, on the other hand, instills, for a time, a kind of dreary tranquillity.
Alberto Moravia
And you have to be careful with illusionists: sometimes evil deceives us by assuming the simplest form of things.
Donato Carrisi
Because evil, my dear child, can be done to anyone and by everyone, but good can only be done to those who need it.
Luigi Pirandello
The devil is not the prince of matter; the devil is the arrogance of spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns from whence he came.
Umberto Eco
..it happens in all human affairs that we never seek to escape one mischief without falling into another. Prudence therefore consists in knowing how to distinguish degrees of disadvantage, and in accepting a less evil as a good.
Niccolò Machiavelli
She wrote, in the last pages, of feeling all the evil of the neighborhood around her. Rather, she wrote obscurely, good and evil are mixed together and reinforce each other in turn. Marcello, if you thought about it, was really a good arrangement, but the good tasted of the bad and the bad tasted of the good, it was a mixture that took your breath away. A few evenings earlier, something had happened that had really scared her. Marcello had left, the television was off, the house was empty, Rino was out, her parents were going to bed. She was alone in the kitchen washing the dishes and was tired, really without energy, when there was an explosion. She had turned suddenly and realized that the big copper pot had exploded. Like that, by itself. It was hanging on the nail where it normally hung, but in the middle there was a large hole and the rim was lifted and twisted and the pot itself was all deformed, as if it could no longer maintain its appearance as a pot. Her mother had hurried in in her nightgown and blamed her for dropping it and ruining it. But a copper pot, even if you drop it, doesn't break and doesn't become misshapen like that. "It's this sort of thing," Lila concluded, "that frightens me. More than Marcello, more than anyone. And I feel that I have to find a solution, otherwise, everything, one thing after another, will break, everything, everything.
Elena Ferrante
The world has come to such a state that one can no longer find anyone who does good.
Girolamo Savonarola
A knowledge with no clear idea of Evil as universe and principle, a knowledge that pays no mind to the evil that man is and was and for which he is forced to atone, is knowledge with a view to Evil, in favor of Evil, and probably suggested by Evil.
Ceronetti
Comrade, your statement is factually incorrect.” “Yes, it is. But it is politically correct.” (The Rise of Political Correctness)
Angelo Codevilla
Not to punish evil is equivalent to authorizing it.
Leonardo da Vinci
Good always has a price, Marcus. Evil comes free.
Donato Carrisi
There is no absolute hate or evil. On the contrary hate or evil are always intimately blended with love and goodness. What causes more hate and evil is paradoxically what tends to be done in the name of love and goodness. Hence, in order to reduce hate and evil we need to be aware of love and goodness, rather than hate and evil.
Franco Santoro
Throughout the world what remains of the vast public spaces are now only the stuff of legends: Robin Hood’s forest, the Great Plains of the Amerindians, the steppes of the nomadic tribes, and so forth… Rousseau said that the first person who wanted a piece of nature as his or her own exclusive possession and transformed it into the transcendent form of private property was the one who invented evil. Good, on the contrary, is what is common.
Antonio Negri
But why, everybody asks, am I not blessed by fortune (or at least not as blessed as I would like to be)? Why have I not been favored like others who are less deserving? No one believes their misfortunes are attributable to any shortcomings of their own; that is why they must find a culprit.
Umberto Eco
Put off this sloth,' the master said, 'for shame!Sitting on feather-pillows, lying reclined Beneath the blanket is no way to fame -Fame, without which man's life wastes out of mind, Leaving on earth no more memorialThan foam in water or smoke upon the wind
Dante Alighieri
Fate's arrow, when expected, travels slow.
Dante Alighieri
If you, free as you are of every weighthad stayed below, then that would be as strangeas living flame on earth remaining still."And then she turned her gaze up toward the heavens.
Dante Alighieri
For certain he hath seen all perfectnessFor certain he hath seen all perfectness. Who among other ladies hath seen mine: They that go with her humbly should combine To thank their God for such peculiar grace. So perfect is the beauty of her face That it begets in no wise any sign Of envy, but draws round her a clear line Of love, and blessed faith, and gentleness. Merely the sight of her inakes all things bow: Not she herself alone is holier Than all: but hers, through her, are raised above. From all her acts such lovely graces flow That truly one may never think of her Without a passion of exceeding love.
Dante Alighieri
The Divine Light is always in man, presenting itself to the senses and to the comprehension, but man rejects it.
Giordano Bruno
There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the passion of life.
Federico Fellini
The man was more temperamental than she was. Not an easy feat. (Mina's view of Diego.)
Maria Grazia Swan
Oh, here we go, firing questions right and left. I sort of missed that part. [Mina's most endearing trait?]
Maria Grazia Swan
There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.
Umberto Eco
Though I leave the house as little as possible, I have the impression that someone is disturbing my papers. More than once I have discovered that some pages were missing from my manuscripts. A few days afterward I would find the pages in their place again. But often I no longer recognize my manuscripts, as if I had forgotten what I had written, or as if overnight I were so changed that no longer recognized myself in the self of yesterday.
Italo Calvino
When you start searching for ‘pure elements’ in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons: Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process. n The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors. n The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn’t do the job quite as well. n Good writers without salient qualities. Men who are fortunate enough to be born when the literature of a given country is in good working order, or when some particular branch of writing is ‘healthy’. For example, men who wrote sonnets in Dante’s time, men who wrote short lyrics in Shakespeare’s time or for several decades thereafter, or who wrote French novels and stories after Flaubert had shown them how. n Writers of belles-lettres. That is, men who didn’t really invent anything, but who specialized in some particular part of writing, who couldn’t be considered as ‘great men’ or as authors who were trying to give a complete presentation of life, or of their epoch. n The starters of crazes.Until the reader knows the first two categories he will never be able ‘to see the wood for the trees’. He may know what he ‘likes’. He may be a ‘compleat book-lover’, with a large library of beautifully printed books, bound in the most luxurious bindings, but he will never be able to sort out what he knows to estimate the value of one book in relation to others, and he will be more confused and even less able to make up his mind about a book where a new author is ‘breaking with convention’ than to form an opinion about a book eighty or a hundred years old.He will never understand why a specialist is annoyed with him for trotting out a second- or third-hand opinion about the merits of his favourite bad writer. n
Ezra Pound
Theoretically speaking a good reader should also be a good learner, whatever the century and the place!
Carl William Brown
Literature is language charged with meaning
Ezra Pound
We, writers & poets, have a big problem. We swim too deep inside life, also in shallow waters, and then we end touching the sand!
Rossana Condoleo
Don't be timid. You're a writer, use your role, test it, make something of it. These are decisive times, everything is turning upside down. Participate, be present.
Elena Ferrante
I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t. . . . I very much love those mysterious volumes, both ancient and modern, that have no definite author but have had and continue to have an intense life of their own. They seem to me a sort of nighttime miracle, like the gifts of the Befana, which I waited for as a child. . . . True miracles are the ones whose makers will never be known. . . .
Elena Ferrante
Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap; the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then or never again.
Italo Calvino
To cause pain was a disease. As a child I imagined tiny, almost invisible animals that arrived in the neighborhood at night, they came from the ponds, from the abandoned train cars beyond the embankment, from the stinking grasses called fetienti, from the frogs, the salamanders, the flies, the rocks, the dust, and entered the water and the food and the air, making our mothers, our grandmothers as angry as starving dogs.
Elena Ferrante
The faith a movement proclaims doesn't count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.
Umberto Eco
For centuries, as pope and emperor tore each other apart in their quarrels over power, the excluded went on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true lepers are only the illustration ordained by God to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying 'lepers' we would understand 'outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities.' But we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign.
Umberto Eco
And St. Francis added: "My dear and beloved Brother, the treasure of blessed poverty is so very precious and divine that we are not worthy to possess it in our vile bodies. For poverty is that heavenly virtue by which all earthy and transitory things are trodden under foot, and by which every obstacle is removed from the soul so that it may freely enter into union with the eternal Lord God. It is also the virtue which makes the soul, while still here on earth, converse with the angels in Heaven. It is she who accompanied Christ on the Cross, was buried with Christ in the Tomb, and with Christ was raised and ascended into Heaven, for even in this life she gives to souls who love her the ability to fly to Heaven, and she alone guards the armor of true humility and charity.
Francis of Assisi
How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon!
Umberto Eco
This is Nimrod, because of whose vile plan the world no longer speaks a single tongue.
Dante Alighieri
You live in a damnably twisted and convoluted world," replied Mathias. "And you are trampling accross it with all the delicacy of an elephant in a glass shop!" -Conversation between Mathias Munster and Giacomo Foscarini
Riccardo Bruni
He was staring hard, not at his wife and me but at his daughter watching us. In his cold pupil, in the firm twist of his lips, was reflected Madame Miyagi's orgasm reflected in her daughter's gaze.
Italo Calvino
He’s not yet realized that by giving away nothing but barefaced lies he’s come to wither and rot inside. But she’s still looking for him into the void of his cold heart.
Mirella Muffarotto
If she had looked into his eyes at that very moment she would have seen the inferno that she had thrown him into.
Mirella Muffarotto
Everything around her was in a fog; the intense light that always shone in his aqua blue eyes was the only thing in focus, but it was suddenly unknown... different... almost embarrassing.
Mirella Muffarotto
He could no longer pretend not to have been brought to his knees by her blows, and he could no longer avoid the sentiments that his heart forced him to feel.
Mirella Muffarotto
Because you make me want to live. You make me want to grow old with you. You give me hope, and that scares me more than anything else
Daniele Lanzarotta
...to the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world’. You’re one of the lucky ones. You’re the world to far more people than you think.
Daniele Lanzarotta
To some of those girls, school will be the highlight of their lives. People like you…people who are beautiful inside and out…those are the ones who will shine in whatever they decide to do. [Alec]
Daniele Lanzarotta
But you’re right about one thing: he’s my best friend. I know him very well, and no matter what he said or did tonight, I’ve never seen him act this way with another girl. No one,” he repeated, “except you.
Mirella Muffarotto
Marika was a book nerd and had a TBR pile taller than her. She was a sucker for YA
Mirella Muffarotto
...I would want to spend it with you. Even if we had thousands of nights, I would want to spend every single one of them with you.
Daniele Lanzarotta
Healing takes place when grievances are given ample and patient space to be acknowledged, when there is transparency and honesty, when everybody is given the chance to be heard, when nobody is excluded, when people can accept the energy of the conflict and use it as a major opportunity for growth.
Franco Santoro
If the painter has clumsy hands, he will be apt to introduce them into his works, and so of any other part of his person, which may not happen to be so beautiful as it ought to be. He must, therefore, guard particularly against that self-love, or too good opinion of his own person, and study by every means to acquire the knowledge of what is most beautiful, and of his own defects, that he may adopt the one and avoid the other.
Leonardo da Vinci
Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, 'How did he do it? He must be a genius!
Gian-Carlo Rota
Fine gold is recognized when it is tested.
Leonardo da Vinci
No counsel is more sincere than that given on ships which are in danger.
Leonardo da Vinci
No one knows, at sight a masterpiece.And give up verse, my boy,There's nothing in it.Likewise a friend of Bloughram's once advised me:Don't kick against the pricks,Accept opinion. The Nineties tried your gameAnd died, there's nothing in it.
Ezra Pound
Never joke about the job of your friend. He/she feeds their family with it and it affects their dignity!
Rossana Condoleo