Quotes by Italian Authors - Page 16

I'm not that man anymore. No one can stay that way too long. That's why wars end and a later generation catches its breath looking forward and erasing what's behind.
Erri De Luca
The Templars' mental confusion makes them indecipherable. That's why so many people venerate them.
Umberto Eco
Though everyone in the bar knew who he was, no one asked him about the death, though one old man did rustle his newspaper suggestively.
Donna Leon
There was a brown substance inside and Chase had no doubt: it was heroin. Only a tiny amount, but very pure." - Cutting Right to the Chase Vol.2
Stefania Mattana
Have you ever been in jail, mate? Whatever you did in your life, nothing can be compared to a single day in jail.
Stefania Mattana
Paoletta turned to him with a dark face.“You’d better watch out, Chase. He’s passed over to the evil side.
Stefania Mattana
The wheel turns for all, caro Chase. It’s the karma effect,” Giulia cried, aping Ilenia. She could have never imagined that her words would become prophetic so soon.
Stefania Mattana
It was Chase who had obtained the information from the girl’s boyfriend during a party in an Irish pub, simply by using his British friendliness and charm.
Stefania Mattana
Paoletta turned to him with a dark face. Chase had never seen her look so foreboding.“You’d better watch out, Chase. He’s passed over to the evil side.
Stefania Mattana
Mr Benz, the parapet of an Italian bridge doesn’t look like the proper place for you,” said Chase.
Stefania Mattana
What is aesthetically beautiful, should not be able to be understood fully: by its mysterious character it should leave behind a vaguely pleasant feeling.
Nicola Lecca
Mom, you know what? I just realized you have a knack for making people disappear. [Lella's son catches on!]
Maria Grazia Swan
Lella York, the self-proclaimed queen of passive-aggressive behavior. [Lella's perceptive view of herself]
Maria Grazia Swan
The birds sang in the dustin an elaborate weave, ambiguous,deafening, prey to existencepoor passions lost between the modestsummits of groves of mulberry and elder;and I, like them, in secluded placesreserved for the lost and pure,would wait for evening to fall,for the silent smells of fireand joyous misery to fill the air,for the Angelus bell to toll, veiledin the new peasant mysteryfulfilled in the ancient mystery.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Just calm down and think, sir. Think. Where is your wife?
Stefania Mattana
Chase rushed after her in pursuit. The woman lost one of her high-heeled shoes and Chase took advantage of her lack of balance to tackle her. They crashed to the ground.“Why are you running from the ball, Cinderella?” he asked.
Stefania Mattana
Chase stooped to inspect it. Angelo handed him a latex glove, which took Chase three attempts to pull on before tearing it. He had never had a good relationship with latex. He tried two more, tearing each one of those too.
Stefania Mattana
Desires are but pain and torment, and enjoyment is sweet because it delivers us from them.
Giacomo Casanova
Desire urges me on, while fear bridals me.
Giordano Bruno
Don't canonize me too soon. I'm perfectly capable of fathering a child.
Francis of Assisi
I have indeed lived and worked to my taste either in art or science. What more could a man desire? Knowledge has always been my goal. There is much that I shall leave behind undone…but something at least I was privileged to leave for the world to use, if it so intends…As the Latin poet said I will leave the table of the living like a guest who has eaten his fill. Yes, if I had another life to spend, I certainly would not waste it. But that cannot be, so why complain?
Léon Camille Marius Croizat
When had I tamed myself? It had been a lengthy apprenticeship, begun when I was as young as ten, and continued relentlessly throughout my adolescence, when I had discovered to my own terror that I wanted to murder somebody: my father, a sarcastic friend, my professor of Latin and Greek, even a rude passerby. It was not until I was almost twenty that I began to suspect that, along with the repression of my violent impulses, I had repressed everything, even my ability to experience a profound emotion, even my impulse to do good deeds and help others. I had become as good as I had hoped to be, but good with the cautious detachment of one who never indulges in excess.
Domenico Starnone
The source of love, as I learned later, is a curiosity which, combined with the inclination which nature is obliged to give us in order to preserve itself. […] Hence women make no mistake in taking such pains over their person and their clothing, for it is only by these that they can arouse a curiosity to read them in those whom nature at their birth declared worthy of something better than blindness. […] As time goes on a man who has loved many women, all of them beautiful, reaches the point of feeling curious about ugly women if they are new to him. He sees a painted woman. The paint is obvious to him, but it does not put him off. His passion, which has become a vice, is ready with the fraudulent title page. ‘It is quite possible,’ he tells himself, ‘that the book is not as bad as all that; indeed, it may have no need of this absurd artifice.’ He decides to scan it, he tries to turn over the pages—but no! the living book objects; it insists on being read properly, and the ‘egnomaniac’ becomes a victim of coquetry, the monstrous persecutor of all men who ply the trade of love.You, Sir, who are a man of intelligence and have read these least twenty lines, which Apollo drew from my pen, permit me to tell you that if they fail to disillusion you, you are lost—that is, you will be the victim of the fair sex to the last moment of your life. If that prospect pleases you, I congratulate you
Giacomo Casanova
But Ludmilla is always at least one step ahead of you. “I like to know that book exists that I will still be able to read…” she says, sure that existent objects, concrete albeit unknown, must correspond to the strength of her desire. How can you keep up with her, this woman who is always reading another book besides the one before her eyes, a book that does not yet exist, but which, since she wants it, cannot fail to exist?
Italo Calvino
The exotic and the erotic ideals go hand in hand, and this fact also contributes another proof of a more or less obvious truth - that is, that a love of the exotic is usually an imaginative projection of a sexual desire.
Mario Praz
I, answering in the end, began: 'Alas,how many yearning thoughts, what great desire,have lead them through such sorrow to their fate?
Dante Alighieri
We always have to blame our failures on somebody else, and dictatorships always need an external enemy to bind their followers together. As the man said, for every complex problem there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong.
Umberto Eco
He is always on the brink of suicide... because he seeks salvation through the routine formulas suggested to him by the society in which he lives.
Umberto Eco
Suicide is an act of man and not of the animal.
Primo Levi
What did the Romans say? “De gustibus non est disputandum”: It is worthless to discuss personal taste. It is called 'personal' for a reason.
Massimo Marino
A man can do all things if he but wills them.
Leon Battista Alberti
Sex appeal is fifty percent what you've got and fifty percent what people think you've got.
Sophia Loren
If it is true that one gets used to suffering, how is it that as the years go one always suffers more? No, they are not mad, those people who amuse themselves, enjoy life, travel, make love, fight—they are not mad. We should like to do the same ourselves.
Cesare Pavese
The cadence of suffering has begun.
Cesare Pavese
And I read hundreds and thousands of books, day and night, always awake and always eager to seek health. But in no book I found what I was looking for. Then, shut up in my parents' house, I thought and suffered for hundreds and thousands of hours, always awake and always mindful of the tremendous anxiety of health. But I still have not found what I was looking for.
Giovanni Papini
One learns not to need by needing.
Antonio Porchia
It is a property of works of genius that, even when they represent vividly the nothingness of things, even when they clearly show and make you feel the inevitable unhappiness of life, even when they express the most terrible despair, nevertheless to a great soul that finds itself in a state of extreme dejection, disenchantment, nothingness, boredom, and discouragement about life, or in the most bitter and deathly misfortune (whether on account of lofty, powerful passions or something else), such works always bring consolation, [260] and rekindle enthusiasm, and, though they treat and represent nothing but death, they restore, albeit momentarily, the life that it had lost. And so, while that which is seen in the reality of things grieves and kills the soul, when seen in imitation or any other form in works of genius (e.g., in lyric poetry, which is not, properly speaking, imitation), it opens and revives the heart. In fact, just as the author who described and felt so powerfully the vanity of illusions, but still preserved a great fund of them and gave ample proof of this by conveying their vanity so accurately (see pp. 214–15), in the same way, the reader, however disillusioned both about himself and about what he reads, is yet drawn by the author into the same deception and illusion that he experienced and that are hidden in the most intimate recesses of his spirit. And the recognition of the irredeemable vanity and falsity of all beauty and all greatness is itself a kind of beauty and greatness that fills the soul when it is conveyed by a work of genius." from "Zibaldone
leopardi
Why d’you make me suffer?"“Because I love you.”Now it was his turn to get angry. “No, no, you don’t love me! People in love want happiness, not pain!”“People in love want only love, even at the cost of pain.”“Then you’re making people suffer on purpose.”“Yes, to see if you love me.”The Baron’s philosophy would not go any further. “Pain is a negative state of the soul.” “Love is all.” “Pain should always be fought against.”“Love refuses nothing.”“Some things I’ll never admit.”“Oh yes, you do, now, for you love me and you suffer.
Italo Calvino
If I were to draw, I would apply myself only to studying the form of inanimate objects," I said somewhat imperiously, because I wanted to change the subjects and also because a natural inclination does truly lead me to recognise my moods in the motionless suffering of things.
Italo Calvino
And St. Francis said: 'My dear son, be patient, because the weaknesses of the body are given to us in this world by God for the salvation of the soul. So they are of great merit when they are borne patiently.
Francis of Assisi
Because in this way all I did was to accumulate past after past behind me, multiplying the pasts, and if one life was too dense and ramified and embroiled for me to bear it always with me, imagine so many lives, each with its own past and the pasts of the other lives that continue to become entangled one with the others.
Italo Calvino
It may be possible to forget our past but our past is not going to forget us.
Francesca Marciano
I've never tried to block out the memories of the past, even though some are painful. I don't understand people who hide from their past. Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now.
Sophia Loren
Evolution did not design us to believe only true facts, nor to buy only useful products, nor to say only meaningful sentences
Piero Scaruffi
When I felt I was dying, these past few days, things were no longer anthropomorphic. The telephone, which looks like a sort of upturned black snake, was merely a telephone. Every thing was just a thing. The couch, which looked like a big square face drawn by Rubens, with buttons on the cover like wicked little eyes, was just a couch, rather shabby but nothing more. At such a time things don’t matter to you; you don’t bathe everything in your presence, like an amoeba. Things become innocent because you draw away from them; experience becomes virginal, as it was for the first man when he saw the valleys and the plains. You feel you are set in a tidy world: that is a door and it behaves like a door, that is white and behaves like white. What heaven: the symbolism of meanings loses all meaning. You see objects which are comforting because they are quite free. But suddenly you are flung into a new form of suffering because, when you come to miss the meaning of, say, a stool, reality suddenly becomes terrifying. Everything becomes monstrous, unattainable.
Federico Fellini
Any fact becomes important when it’s connected to another. The connection changes the perspective; it leads you to think that every detail of the world, every voice, every word written or spoken has more than its literal meaning, that it tells us a Secret.
Umberto Eco
The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.
Umberto Eco
We are just a certain quantity of cells, all of us!
Rossana Condoleo
Do you really know yourself so well or are you making it up?' she asks. Some things I concoct, some I glean from my senses, most I thirst for.
Erri De Luca
CHAPTER VIConcerning New Principalities Which Are Acquired By One's Own Arms And AbilityLET no one be surprised if, in speaking of entirely new principalities as I shall do, I adduce the highest examples both of prince and of state; because men, walking almost always in paths beaten by others, and following by imitation their deeds, are yet unable to keep entirely to the ways of others or attain to the power of those they imitate. A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savour of it. Let him act like the clever archers who, designing to hit the mark which yet appears too far distant, and knowing the limits to which the strength of their bow attains, take aim much higher than the mark, not to reach by their strength or arrow to so great a height, but to be able with the aid of so high an aim to hit the mark they wish to reach.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Self-development is a contradiction in terms Personal development is the way.
Frank Ra (Exstatica)
Moses Luzzatto always said to be patient during the hard times, that they would have to endure and make sacrifices while they waited for better times to come. He urged Simone and the other Jewish boys not to provoke the Venetians, saying they should remain separate and focus on their work. He said their traditions were crucial to their identity, just as they were for their fathers before them.
Riccardo Bruni
We become aware of the void as we fill it.
Antonio Porchia
What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?
Michelangelo Buonarroti
We cam leave the rat race to rodents... but I suspect that even they wouldn't like it.
Adriano Bulla
The whole problem of life is this: how to break out of one's own solitude, how to communicate with others.
Cesare Pavese
Could my proud loneliness be merely an illusion?
Nicola Lecca
The life is cruel death to me without you.
Veronica Franco
It was at this period that Drogo realised how far apart men are whatever their affection for each other, that if you suffer the pain is yours and yours alone, no one else can take upon himself the least part of it; that if you suffer it does not mean that others feel pain even though their love is great: hence the loneliness of life.
Dino Buzzati
By now he had learned. Choices are made in brief seconds and paid for in the time that remains.
Paolo Giordano