Mela > Books: region-italy‎ (27)

"And I can tell you too, Don Pietrino, that if, as has often happened before, this class were to vanish, an equivalent one would be formed straight

"And I can tell you too, Don Pietrino, that if, as has often happened before, this class were to vanish, an equivalent one would be formed straight away with the same qualities and the same defects; it might not be based on blood any more, but possibly on . . . on, say, the length of time lived in a place, or on greater knowledge of some text considered sacred."

the Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery;

Flattery always slipped off the Prince like water off the leaves of water lilies: it is one of the advantages enjoyed by men who are at once proud and used to being so.

Such thoughts were disagreeable, as are all those that make us understand things too late

"But you know better than I, Prince, that even fixed stars are so only in appearance."

And as they climbed down toward the road, it would have been difficult to tell which of the two was Don Quixote and which was Sancho Panza.

“I don’t think either of them could have outlived Austria.”

“I don’t think either of them could have outlived Austria.”

But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically

The man was much greater than the sum of his qualities.

The man was much greater than the sum of his qualities.

salute the courage of a man who dared

salute the courage of a man who dared

The old are always frightened of the young, but you represent a threat to their whole way of life

“You know the one thing that nobody in our country can endure?” he asked lightly, holding his glass against the light. “Not only our country but throughout the world, and right through history? Loss of face. We create an image of ourselves, and someone destroys the image. We are made to look ridiculous. You talked just now about humiliation, which is the same thing. The man, or the nation, who loses face either never recovers and so disintegrates, or learns humility, which is a very different thing from humiliation"

I’m here to bring trouble and discord, to set one man against the other, to bring all the violence and hypocrisy and envy and lust out into the open, onto the surface, like the scum on Domenico’s pool. Only then, when it bubbles and seethes and stinks, can we clear it away.

once is no good

I wondered how it could be that two people who had loved could yet have such a misconception of each other and, with a common grief, grow far apart

I wondered how it could be that two people who had loved could yet have such a misconception of each other and, with a common grief, grow far apart. There must be something in the nature of love between a man and a woman that drove them to torment and suspicion.

There it was before me. Not the blue estuary of home, rippling, and salty fresh, whipped with sea spray, but a slow-moving turgid stream, brown like the riverbed beneath it, oozing and sucking its way under the arches of the bridge, and ever and again its flat smooth surface breaking into bubbles.

She was young, not more than nineteen or so, but the expression on her face was ageless, haunting, as though she possessed in her lithe body an old soul that could not die; centuries in time looked out from those two eyes, she had contemplated life so long it had become indifferent to her.

But I wondered, with a sudden flash of bitterness, what their manner would have been to me if, after all, I had not inherited the property. Would the deference be there? The respect? The loyalty? Or would I have been young Master Philip, a poor relative, with a room of my own stuck away somewhere at the back of the house? I knocked out my pipe, the taste was dry and dusty. How many people were there, I wondered, who liked me and served me for myself alone?