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Quotes by Italian Authors
"Saturn seems to have impressed the seal of melancholy on me from the beginning."
"Public and private food in America has become eatable, here and there extremely good. Only the fried potatoes go unchanged, as deadly as before."
"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Tell the others right away, 'No, I don't want to watch TV! I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!"
"The facts of life are that a child who has seen war cannot be compared with a child who doesn't know what war is except from television."
"Women are clear-headed, they are more creative and for this reason, sometimes, also more fragile."
"I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do."
"Truth at last cannot be hidden. Dissimulation is of no avail. Dissimulation is to no purpose before so great a judge. Falsehood puts on a mask. Nothing is hidden under the sun."
"It is extraordinary to have time to again study Le nozze di Figaro and discover new things."
"Waste no time with revolutions that do not remove the causes of your complaints but simply change the faces of those in charge."
"My mother was a regular church-goer and was very tolerant."
"The one effective method of defending one's own territory from an offensive by air is to destroy the enemy's air power with the greatest possible speed."
"We'll make an army in the trees and bring the earth and the people on it to their senses."
"Memories are like stones, time and distance erode them like acid."
"I don't know whether these people are going to find themselves, but as they live their lives they have no choice but to face up to the image others have of them. They're forced to look at themselves in a mirror, and they often manage to glimpse something of themselves."
"Fascism was a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place."
"I don't think you can in any way export culture with guns or tanks."
"The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to concern himself with the world that repels him."
"It is always self-defeating to pretend to a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history."
"To conquer the command of the air means victory; to be beaten in the air means defeat and acceptance of whatever terms the enemy may be pleased to impose."
"Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another."
"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."
"Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry."
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."
"The function of muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the genitals and the tongue."
"The appearance of a single great genius is more than equivalent to the birth of a hundred mediocrities."
"I am neither a sociologist nor a politician. All I can do is imagine for myself what the future will be like."
"On a group of theories one can found a school; but on a group of values one can found a culture, a civilization, a new way of living together among men."
"Is any man free except the one who can pass his life as he pleases?"
"Unfortunately, goodness and honor are rather the exception than the rule among exceptional men, not to speak of geniuses."
"Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one."
"It [Foucault's Pendulum] can be very comforting for people of my generation, who ate disappointment for breakfast, lunch, and dinner."
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