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Quotes by Italian Authors
"Our life is full of empty space."
"Humans: become atheists each and all! God will nevertheless welcome you with all his heart!"
"A woman is always a mystery: one must not be fooled by her face and her hearts inspiration."
"What he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places."
"To emend one's thinking constantly is a desirable practice, and one I often engage in--sometimes to the point of being almost schizophrenic. But there are cases where one should not parade changes just to prove one is up to date. In the field of ideas, as much as in other fields, monogamy is not necessarily a sign of absence of libido."
"It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once."
"The difference between the true and the false is only a prejudice of ours."
"I was upset. I had always believed logic was a universal weapon and now I realized how its validity depended on the way it was employed."
"How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and stories that take shape and disappear without anyone's ever writing them there were not interposed that uncomfortable partition which is my person! Style, taste, individual philosophy, subjectivity, cultural background, real experience, psychology, talent, tricks of the trade: all the elements that make what I write recognizable as mine seem to me a cage that restricts my possibilities. If I were only a hand, a severed hand that grasps a pen and writes...who would move this hand? The anonymous throng? The spirit of the times? The collective unconscious? I do not know."
"Just as women's bodies are softer than men's, so their understanding is sharper."
"No counsel is more sincere than that given on ships which are in danger."
"Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement."
"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."
"I have always believed that opera is a planet where the muses work together, join hands and celebrate all the arts."
"How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon."
"Fear prophets, Adso, 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."
"As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active power of the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of a woman comes from defect in the active power."
"And meanwhile the Galaxy ran through space and left behind those signs old and new and I still hadn't found mine."
"But it has often happened that I have found the most seductive depictions of sin in the pages of those very men of incorruptible virtue who condemned their spell and their effects."
"There are those who have a desire to love, but do not have the capacity to love."
"He who does Christ's work must stay with Christ always."
"The older I grow and the more I abandon myself to God's will, the lessI value intelligence that wants to know and will that wants to do; andas the only element of salvation I recognize faith, which can wait patiently,without asking too many questions."
"Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man's faculties, and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements."
"There, Master Niketas,' Baudolino said, 'when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds. A bit with the help of wine, and a bit with that of the green honey. There is nothing better than imagining other worlds,' he said, 'to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn't yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one."
"If I had a single flower for every time I think about you, I could walk forever in my garden."
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