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Quotes by Italian Authors
"It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the sparks that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances."
"I've been in love for five hundred million years."
"Falsehood is never in words, it is in things."
"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?"
"All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions."
"I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed."
"Painting is mute poetry, and poetry is blind painting."
"The real protagonist of the story, however, is the magic ring, because it is the movements of the ring that determine those of the characters and because it is the ring that establishes the relationships between them. Around the magic object there forms a kind of force field that is in fact the territory of the story itself. We might say that the magic object is an outward and visible sign that reveals the connection between people or between events. . . We might even say that in a narrative any object is always magic."
"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."
"If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space."
"Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them."
"I do what I like now. I just don't have time for it all."
"Marco's answers and objections took their place in a discourse already proceeding on its own, in the Great Khan's head. That is to say, between the two of them it did not matter whether questions and solutions were uttered aloud or whether each of the two went on pondering in silence. In fact, they were silent, their eyes half-closed, reclining on cushions, swaying in hammocks, smoking long amber pipes.Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there."
"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."
"The people of God cannot be changed until the outcasts are restored to its body."
"Only by having a sense of history's trajectory (even if one does not believe in Parousia) can one love earthly reality and believe-with charity-that there is still room for Hope."
"How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon."
"I am glad to have this opportunity of expressing my high appreciation of the honour extended to me many years ago by the Royal Swedish Academy of Science by enrolling me amongst its members."
"I cannot solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art."
"The modern composer builds upon the foundation of truth."
"Always I pay. Always I pay. How do you know Gelli? What do you want? How much do you want?"
"If one starts to draw comparisons between what is and what is not, it is the poorer qualities of the former that strike you, the impurities, the flaws; in short, you can only really feel safe with nothingness."
"Three conditions are necessary for Penance: contrition, which is sorrow for sin, together with a purpose of amendment; confession of sins without any omission; and satisfaction by means of good works."
"Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity."
"But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world."
"Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness."
"He who does not value life does not deserve it."
"As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death."
"I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather:that man is called 'I' and you know nothing else about him, just as this station is called only 'station' and beyond it there exists nothing except the unanswered signal of a telephone ringing in a dark room of a distant city."
"Can you call yourself a coward simply because the courage of others seems to you out of proportion to the triviality of the occasion? Thus wisdom creates cowards. And thus you miss Opportunity while spending your life on the lookout for it."
"William made an ejaculation in his own language that I didn't understand, nor did the abbot understand it, and perhaps it was best for us both, because the word William uttered had an obscene hissing sound."
"People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction."
"The room where I am lodging is stupendous. Thank God I am as fit as a fiddle."
"A woman at 20 is like ice, at 30 she is warm and at 40 she is hot."
"To generalize on women is dangerous. To specialize on them is infinitely worse."
"Journeys to relive your past?' was the Khan's question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: 'Journeys to recover your future?'And Marco's answer was: 'Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and willnever have."
"A good painter is to paint two main things namely men and the working of man's mind."
"The natural desire of good men is knowledge."
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