Quotes by Italian Authors - Page 9

He was going to hurt the people he hated, but inside he didn't feel any real sense of satisfaction. He hated them all the more for having made him feel so small, so petty and mean, which was all he felt just then. But it wasn't enough to stop him.
Riccardo Bruni
Love sometimes makes people ruthless in a way that not even hatred can.
Francesca Marciano
You don’t appreciate the fact that madmen are very lucky.
Luigi Pirandello
In his madness he became a terrifying actor!
Luigi Pirandello
He who wishes to be rich within a day, will be hanged within a year.
Leonardo da Vinci
I wonder why the wind, even the wind doth seemTo mock me now, all night, all night, andHave I strayed among the cliffs hereThey say, some day I'll fallDown through the sea-bit fissures, and no moreKnow the warm cloak of sun, or batheThe dew across my tired eyes to comfort them.They try to keep me hid within four walls.I will not stay!
Ezra Pound
Oh, you are mad!" she exclaimed, quite out of patience."Possibly. But I like my madness.
Rafael Sabatini
Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.
Primo Levi
The height of perfection is mediocrity.
Pitigrilli
I, on the contrary, have been convinced for some time that perfection is not produced except marginally and by chance; therefore it deserves no interest at all, the true nature of things being revealed only in disintegration.
Italo Calvino
Mankind is a great, an immense family... This is proved by what we feel in our hearts at Christmas.
Pope John XXIII
I looked up from the ground and glared at Scarlett, who helped Steven stand up. “You bitch.” I growled, sitting up. She looked back at me and walked over to where I was. I kept my glare on her, and just as I was about to stand up, her foot came and hit me in the face. I flung back around and my vision started to blur as my head hit the ground. I heard the squishing noise of Scarlett’s heels against the wet ground and her say her last words to me: “See you in a while, Aiyanna. We’ll do lunch.” And then they were gone, just like that. That’s when I couldn’t hold on any longer and I let the blackness consume me.
Sara Massa
A man dies and his skin loses heat like the sand on a summer evening. It makes you feel like warming him up.
Erri De Luca
But why was the room suddenly becoming so dark? It was the middle of the afternoon. With a supreme effort Giuseppe Corte, who felt himself paralyzed with a strange lethargy, looked at the clock on the nightstand beside the bed. It was 3:30. He turned his head in the other direction and saw that the shutters, in obedience to some mysterious command, were closing slowly, blocking the passage of light.
Dino Buzzati
I wish that death had spared me until your library had been complete.
Lorenzo de' Medici
There is a thin line that separates life from death, but once it's crossed, it becomes as large as an ocean, and so treacherous that it’s impossible to cross back.
Federico Chini
It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.
Umberto Eco
No matter how alone you seem to be right now, just be aware that in this precise moment there are huge amounts of people who totally resonate with you, who share exactly your hopes and desires, who would be most happy to support you, just as you would be happy to support them. Be open to connect with them, and allow them to connect with you.
Franco Santoro
What do you want to say to me?’‘Nothing—just to talk about the profession I am entering. I am about to practice virtue in order to find a man who loves it only to destroy it' [replied Mademoiselle Vesian.]‘That is it exactly; and believe me, everything in this life is much the same. We refer everything to ourselves, and each of us is a tyrant. That is why the best of mortals is he who is tolerant.
Giacomo Casanova
Usually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we call creative develops almost instantaneously in the mystic heat of inspirational raptus; or the other, that the writer has followed a recipe, a kind of secret set of rules that they would like to see revealed.There is no set of rules, or, rather, there are many, varied and flexible rules...
Umberto Eco
Literary truth is not the truth of the biographer or the reporter, it’s not a police report or a sentence handed down by a court. It’s not even the plausibility of a well-constructed narrative. Literary truth is entirely a matter of wording and is directly proportional to the energy that one is able to ­impress on the sentence. And when it works, there is no stereotype or cliché of popular literature that resists it. It reanimates, revives, subjects ­everything to its needs.
Elena Ferrante
I think of writing now as a long, tiring, pleasant seduction. The stories that you tell, the words that you use and refine, the characters you try to give life to are merely tools with which you circle around the elusive, unnamed, shapeless thing that belongs to you alone, and which nevertheless is a sort of key to all the doors, the real reason that you spend so much of your life sitting at a table tapping away, filling pages.
Elena Ferrante
at Florence which included diplomatic missions to various European courts. Imprisoned
Niccolò Machiavelli
Florence which included diplomatic missions to various European courts.
Niccolò Machiavelli
In fact the problem Leopardi is facing is speculative and metaphysical, a problem in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Descartes and Kant: the relationship between the idea of infinity as absolute space and absolute time, and our empirical knowledge of space and time.
Italo Calvino
although science interests me just because of its efforts to escape from anthropomorphic knowledge, I am nonetheless convinced that our imagination cannot be anything but anthropomorphic.
Italo Calvino
For Leopardi, unhappy hedonist that he was, what is unknown is always more attractive than what is known; hope and imagination are the only consolations for the disappointments and sorrows of experience. Man therefore projects his desire into infinity and feels pleasure only when he is able to imagine that this pleasure has no end.
Italo Calvino
The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.
Italo Calvino
Eva’s only fault has been the one of wanting to know more, to experiment and search with her own sources the laws of the Universe, of her own body and to refuse the teachings from “above”. Eva, basically, represents the curiosity of science against the passive acceptance that belongs to faith.
Margherita Hack
...curiosity had the same impact on him as caffeine... (Commissario Soneri)
Valerio Varesi
Never do an enemy a small injury.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Oh, so seldom does fate cast our enemy into our hands, to do with as we will
Donna Leon
People should either be caressed or crushed. If you do them minor damage they will get their revenge; but if you cripple them there is nothing they can do. If you need to injure someone, do it in such a way that you do not have to fear their vengeance.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Anything and everything made her think about him. He was so much a part of her, embedded in her soul. [Mina and Diego]
Maria Grazia Swan
I don't know what you're getting yourself into," said Majid, "but I know I don't like it. Some things in Venice are pure poison." Majid's eyes looked like they could bore through a stone wall. "If someone has put you on a demon's tracks, you'd better make sure the demon doesn't find you first.""What's that supposed to mean," asked Mathias."It means behind every hand stained with blood there's another, and that one stays clean." Majid leaned in close, lowering his voice to a whisper. "What I'm saying is that behind a demon, there's always someone holding the creature on a leash.
Riccardo Bruni
The major religious fundamentalisms—Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Hindu—certainly all demonstrate intense concern for and scrutiny of bodies, through dietary restrictions, corporeal rituals, sexual mandates and prohibitions, and even practices of corporeal mortification and abnegation. What primarily distinguishes fundamentalists from other religious practitioners, in fact, is the extreme importance they give to the body: what it does, what parts of it appear in public, what goes into and comes out of it. Even when fundamentalist norms require hiding a part of the body behind a veil, headscarf, or other articles of clothing, they are really signaling its extraordinary importance. Women’s bodies are obviously the object of the most obsessive scrutiny and regulation in religious fundamentalism, but no bodies are completely exempt from examination and control—men’s bodies, adolescents’ bodies, infants’ bodies, even the bodies of the dead. The fundamentalist body is powerful, explosive, precarious, and that is why it requires constant inspection and care…Nationalist fundamentalisms similarly concentrate on bodies through their attention to and care for the population. The nationalist policies deploy a wide range of techniques for corporeal health and welfare, analyzing birthrates and sanitation, nutrition and housing, disease control and reproductive practices. Bodies themselves constitute the nation, and thus the nation’s highest goal is their promotion and preservation. Like religious fundamentalisms, however, nationalisms, although their gaze seems to focus intently on bodies, really see them merely as an indication or symptom of the ultimate, transcendent object of national identity. With its moral face, nationalism looks past the bodies to see national character, whereas with its militarist face, it sees the sacrifice of bodies in battle as revealing the national spirit. The martyr or the patriotic soldier is thus for nationalism too the paradigmatic figure for how the body is made to disappear and leave behind only an index to a higher plane. Given this characteristic double relation to the body, it makes sense to consider white supremacy (and racism in general) a form of fundamentalism.
Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt
For this can be said of men in general: that they are ungrateful, fickle, hypocrites and dissemblers, avoiders of dangers, greedy for gain; and while you benefit them, they are entirely yours, offering you their blood, their goods, their life, their children,...when need is far away, but when you actually become needy, they turn away. (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn)
Niccolò Machiavelli
Out of his zestful study of Man, from Thucydides to the Encyclopaedists, from Seneca to Rousseau, he had confirmed into an unassailable conviction his earliest conscious impressions of the general insanity of his own species.
Rafael Sabatini
I am constantly amazed by man's inhumanity to man.
Primo Levi
Charity is that with which no man is lost, and without which no man is saved.
St. Charles Borromeo
I am the way into the city of woe,I am the way into eternal pain,I am the way to go among the lost.Justice caused my high architect to move,Divine omnipotence created me,The highest wisdom, and the primal love.Before me there were no created thingsBut those that last forever—as do I.Abandon all hope you who enter here.
Dante Alighieri
He thought back to everything that happened the night before: the hooded men, the chase, his tired heart and weak legs. The very moment in which Mathias realized it was over, when he'd decided to sacrifice his own life in order to save the young man by his side, the monk had found something fundamental inside himself. Deep in his soul, in that hidden place that can only be discovered when a person finds himself poised on the edge of the abyss, gasping what he thought was his last breath, he'd suddenly seen it. Only then did he realize what he held dearest in his heart. Because the last thing to cross his mind, what he'd thought about the moment he'd spun around, prepared to impale himself on the blade, had been a face. No thoughts of God or faith or any other saint. A face. That's when everything became clear.
Riccardo Bruni
Whoever changes one life, changes the whole world.
Michele Amitrani
Matter is but the artificial division of energy.
Adriano Bulla
To the very last, the desire to challenge oneself and understand more. And to the very last: doubt.
Carlo Rovelli
Colorless green ideas sleep furiouslythree old owls on a chest of drawerswere screwingthe daughter of the doctor.But then the mother called them,colorless green ideas slepp furiously.
Umberto Eco
The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis.
Umberto Eco
The death of the entrepreneur is solitude.
Ernesto Sirolli
I felt that not only in my book but in novels in general there was something that truly agitated me, a bare and throbbing heart . . . But was that what I wanted? To write, to write with purpose, to write better than I had already? And to study the stories of the past and the present to understand how they worked, and to learn, learn everything about the world with the sole purpose of constructing living hearts . . .
Elena Ferrante
I believe that, for those who love to write, time spent writing is never wasted. And then isn't it from book to book that we approach the book that we really want to write?
Elena Ferrante
When one stops writing one becomes oneself again, the person one usually is, in terms of occupations, thoughts, language. Thus I am now me again, I am here, I go about my ordinary business, I have nothing to do with the book, or, to be exact, I entered it, but I can no longer enter it.
Elena Ferrante
In this world, you only get what you grab for.
Giovanni Boccaccio
Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.
Italo Calvino
Without entering here into a dissertation upon the historical romance, it may be said that in proper hands it has been and should continue to be one of the most valued and valuable expressions of the literary art. To render and maintain it so, however, it is necessary that certain well-defined limits should be set upon the licence which its writers are to enjoy; it is necessary that the work should be honest work; that preparation for it should be made by a sound, painstaking study of the period to be represented, to the end that a true impression may first be formed and then conveyed. Thus, considering how much more far-reaching is the novel than any other form of literature, the good results that must wait upon such endeavours are beyond question. The neglect of them—the distortion of character to suit the romancer's ends, the like distortion of historical facts, the gross anachronisms arising out of a lack of study, have done much to bring the historical romance into disrepute.
Rafael Sabatini
And what physicians say about consumptive illnesses is applicable here: that at the beginning, such an illness is easy to cure but difficult to diagnose; but as time passes, not having been recognized or treated at the outset, it becomes easy to diagnose but difficult to cure.
Niccolò Machiavelli
When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.
Sophia Loren
What’s got into me? Do I want children? Do I want to be a mamma, nursing and singing lullabies? Marriage plus pregnancy? And if my mother should emerge from my stomach just now when I think I’m safe?
Elena Ferrante
Getting lost is the only place worth going to.
Tiziano Scarpa
Sometimes, when you want to help a broken person, your attempts only remind them of their missing pieces.
Gaia B. Amman