Italy Quotes

“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!”
― Andre Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Amor, ch'al cor gentile ratto s'apprende
prese costui de la bella persona
che mi fu tolta; e 'l modo ancor m'offende.

Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona,
Mi prese del costui piacer sì forte,
Che, come vedi, ancor non m'abbandona..."

"Love, which quickly arrests the gentle heart,
Seized him with my beautiful form
That was taken from me, in a manner which still grieves me.

Love, which pardons no beloved from loving,
took me so strongly with delight in him
That, as you see, it still abandons me not...”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“If he knew, if he only knew that I was giving him every chance to put two and two together and come up with a number bigger than infinity.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“You know, people come to Italy for all sorts of reasons, but when they stay, it's for the same two things."
"What?"
"Love and gelato.”
― Jenna Evans Welch, Love & Gelato

“Let me ask you something, in all the years that you have...undressed in front of a gentleman has he ever asked you to leave? Has he ever walked out and left? No? It's because he doesn't care! He's in a room with a naked girl, he just won the lottery. I am so tired of saying no, waking up in the morning and recalling every single thing I ate the day before, counting every calorie I consumed so I know just how much self loathing to take into the shower. I'm going for it. I have no interest in being obese, I'm just through with the guilt. So this is what I'm going to do, I'm going to finish this pizza, and then we are going to go watch the soccer game, and tomorrow we are going to go on a little date and buy ourselves some bigger jeans.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert

“PASTA!!”
― Hidekaz Himaruya, Hetalia: Axis Powers, Vol. 1

“You may have the universe if I may have Italy”
― Giuseppe Verdi

“First of all, let's get one thing straight. Your Italy and our Italia are not the same thing. Italy is a soft drug peddled in predictable packages, such as hills in the sunset, olive groves, lemon trees, white wine, and raven-haired girls. Italia, on the other hand, is a maze. It's alluring, but complicated. It's the kind of place that can have you fuming and then purring in the space of a hundred meters, or in the course of ten minutes. Italy is the only workshop in the world that can turn out both Botticellis and Berlusconis.”
― Beppe Severgnini, La Bella Figura: A Field Guide to the Italian Mind

“Noi leggeveamo un giorno per diletto
Di Lancialotto, come amor lo strinse;
Soli eravamo e senza alcun sospetto
Per più fiate gli occhi ci sospinse
Quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso;
Ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse.
Quando leggemmo il disiato riso
Esser baciato da cotanto amante,
Questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,
La bocca mi baciò tutto tremante.
Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse:
Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante."

""We were reading one day, to pass the time,
of Lancelot, how love had seized him.
We were alone, and without any suspicion
And time and time again our eyes would meet
over that literature, and our faces paled,
and yet one point alone won us.
When we had read how the desired smile
was kissed by so true a lover,
This one, who never shall be parted from me,
kissed my mouth, all a-tremble.
Gallehault was the book and he who wrote it
That day we read no further.”
― Dante Alighieri

“Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“Watching Italians eat (especially men, I have to say) is a form of tourism the books don't tell you about. They close their eyes, raise their eyebrows into accent marks, and make sounds of acute appreciation. It's fairly sexy. Of course I don't know how these men behave at home, if they help with the cooking or are vain and boorish and mistreat their wives. I realized Mediterranean cultures have their issues. Fine, don't burst my bubble. I didn’t want to marry these guys, I just wanted to watch. (p. 247)”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

“I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert

“I don't believe we shall ever again have any form of society in which men will be free. One should not hope for it. One should not hope for anything. Hope is invented by politicians to keep the electorate happy.”
― Pier Paolo Pasolini, Philippe Séclier

“Why do we think love is a magician? Because the whole power of magic consists in love. The work of magic is the attraction of one thing by another because of a certain affinity of nature.”
― Marsilio Ficino

“If I had been an Italian I am sure that I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism."

(Speech in Rome on 20 January, 1927, praising Mussolini)”
― Winston Churchill

“Lord, my hands were made for blessing, but not my feet!”
― Giovanni Guareschi, The Little World of Don Camillo

“It's temples and palaces did seem
Like fabrics of enchantment pil'd to heaven.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation

“The name of Italy has magic in its very syllables.”
― Mary Shelley

“History is not a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken, but rather, a glorious tale which I wish to be cast in.”
― Pietros Maneos, The Italian Pleasures of Gabriele Paterkallos

“Rome seems a comfort to those with the ambitious soul of an Artist or a Conqueror.”
― Pietros Maneos, Poems of Blood and Passion

“In 1494, King Charles VIII of France invaded Italy. Within months, his army collapsed and fled. It was routed not by the Italian army but by a microbe. A mysterious new disease spread through sex killed many of Charles’s soldiers and left survivors weak and disfigured. French soldiers spread the disease across much of Europe, and then it moved into Africa and Asia. Many called it the French disease. The French called it the Italian disease. Arabs called it the Christian disease. Today, it is called syphilis.”
― Carl Zimmer

“Tonight I watched the sun set at Ponte Vecchio. I think its safe to say I have finally found the place that feels right to me. I just can't believe I had to come halfway across the world to find it.”
― Jenna Evans Welch, Love & Gelato

“In winter you wake up in this city, especially on Sundays, to the chiming of its innumerable bells, as though behind your gauze curtains a gigantic china teaset were vibrating on a silver tray in the pearl-gray sky. You fling the window open and the room is instantly flooded with this outer, peal-laden haze, which is part damp oxygen, part coffee and prayers. No matter what sort of pills, and how many, you've got to swallow this morning, you feel it's not over for you yet. No matter, by the same token, how autonomous you are, how much you've been betrayed, how thorough and dispiriting in your self-knowledge, you assume there is still hope for you, or at least a future. (Hope, said Francis Bacon, is a good breakfast but bad supper.) This optimism derives from the haze, from the prayer part of it, especially if it's time for breakfast. On days like this, the city indeed acquires a porcelain aspect, what with all its zinc-covered cupolas resembling teapots or upturned cups, and the tilted profile of campaniles clinking like abandoned spoons and melting in the sky. Not to mention the seagulls and pigeons, now sharpening into focus, now melting into air. I should say that, good though this place is for honeymoons, I've often thought it should be tried for divorces also - both in progress and already accomplished. There is no better backdrop for rapture to fade into; whether right or wrong, no egoist can star for long in this porcelain setting by crystal water, for it steals the show. I am aware, of course, of the disastrous consequence the above suggestion may have for hotel rates here, even in winter. Still, people love their melodrama more than architecture, and I don't feel threatened. It is surprising that beauty is valued less than psychology, but so long as such is the case, I'll be able to afford this city - which means till the end of my days, and which ushers in the generous notion of the future.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“Indeed, when I came to Italy, I expected to encounter a certain amount of resentment, but have received instead empathy from most Italians. In any reference to George Bush, people only nod to Berlusconi, saying","We understand how it is - we have one, too.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Just calm down and think, sir. Think. Where is your wife?”
― Stefania Mattana, Into the Killer Sphere

“Goddammit! How does the world keep spinning with women on the planet?"

Ian St. John in THE POMPEII SCROLL”
― Jacqueline LaTourrette

“Chase rushed after her in pursuit. The woman lost one of her high-heeled shoes and Chase took advantage of her lack of balance to tackle her. They crashed to the ground.
“Why are you running from the ball, Cinderella?” he asked.”
― Stefania Mattana, Into the Killer Sphere

“Chase stooped to inspect it. Angelo handed him a latex glove, which took Chase three attempts to pull on before tearing it. He had never had a good relationship with latex. He tried two more, tearing each one of those too.”
― Stefania Mattana, Into the Killer Sphere

“My mother delayed my enrollment in the Fascist scouts, the Balilla, as long as possible, firstly because she did not want me to learn how to handle weapons, but also because the meetings that were then held on Sunday mornings (before the Fascist Saturday was instituted) consisted mostly of a Mass in the scouts' chapel. When I had to be enrolled as part of my school duties, she asked that I be excused from the Mass; this was impossible for disciplinary reasons, but my mother saw to it that the chaplain and the commander were aware that I was not a Catholic and that I should not be asked to perform any external acts of devotion in church.

In short, I often found myself in situations different from others, looked on as if I were some strange animal. I do not think this harmed me: one gets used to persisting in one's habits, to finding oneself isolated for good reasons, to putting up with the discomfort that this causes, to finding the right way to hold on to positions which are not shared by the majority.

But above all I grew up tolerant of others' opinions, particularly in the field of religion, remembering how irksome it was to hear myself mocked because I did not follow the majority's beliefs. And at the same time I have remained totally devoid of that taste for anticlericalism which is so common in those who are educated surrounded by religion.

I have insisted on setting down these memories because I see that many non-believing friends let their children have a religious education 'so as not to give them complexes', 'so that they don't feel different from the others.' I believe that this behavior displays a lack of courage which is totally damaging pedagogically. Why should a young child not begin to understand that you can face a small amount of discomfort in order to stay faithful to an idea?

And in any case, who said that young people should not have complexes? Complexes arise through a natural attrition with the reality that surrounds us, and when you have complexes you try to overcome them. Life is in fact nothing but this triumphing over one's own complexes, without which the formation of a character and personality does not happen.”
― Italo Calvino, Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings

“Love is the linchpin that connects the material world with higher levels of existence.”
― Julianne Davidow