Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa Quotes

If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.

Love. Of course, love. Flames for a year, ashes for thirty.

Noi fummo i Gattopardi, i Leoni; quelli che ci sostituiranno saranno gli sciacalletti, le iene; e tutti quanti gattopardi, sciacalli e pecore, continueremo a crederci il sale della terra." ("We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.")

To rage and mock is gentlemanly, to grumble and whine is not.

A house of which one knew every room wasn't worth living in.

As always the thought of his own death calmed him as much as that of others disturbed him: was it perhaps because, when all was said and done, his own death would in the first place mean that of the whole world?

and she loved him still; but the pleasure of shouting “It’s your fault” being the strongest any human being can enjoy, all truths and all feelings were swept along in its wake.

Cambiare tutto perché niente cambi.

L’amore. Certo, l’amore. Fuoco e fiamme per un anno, cenere per trenta.

They are coming to teach us good manners!" I replied in English. "But they won't succeed, because we are gods.

Death, oh yes, it existed of course, but it was something that happened to others. The thought occurred to Don Fabrizio that it was ignorance of this supreme consolation that made the young feel sorrows much more sharply than the old; the latter are nearer the safety exit.

A man of forty-five can consider himself still young till the moment comes when he realises that he has children old enough to fall in love.

Y mientras descendían hasta el camino habría sido difícil decir cuál de los dos eran don Quijote y quién Sancho

Lovers want to be alone, or at least with strangers; never with older people, or worst of all with relatives.

She found herself even without the solace of being able to blame her own unhappiness on others, a solace which is the last deceiving philter of the desperate.

Porque morir por alguien o por algo, está bien, entra en el orden de las cosas; pero conviene saber, o por lo menos estar seguros de que alguien sabe por quiën o por qué se muere

Now you need young men, bright young men, with minds asking ‘how’ rather than ‘why,’ and who are good at masking, at blending, I should say, their personal interests with vague public ideals.

For over twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of superb and heterogeneous civilizations, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own. This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and even these monuments of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing round us like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn't understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind.

…They're dangerous as all gifts from the sea are; the sea offers death as well as immortality.

We're not blind, we're just human. We live in a changing reality to which we try to adapt ourselves like seaweed bending under the pressure of water.

Those were the best days in the life of Tancredi and Angelica, lives later to be so variegated, so erring, against the inevitable background of sorrow. But that they did not know then; and they were pursuing a future which they deemed more concrete than it turned out to be, made of nothing but smoke and wind. When they were old and uselessly wise their thoughts would go back to those days with insistent regret; they had been days when desire was always present because it was always overcome, when many beds had been offered and refused, when the sensual urge, because restrained, had for one second been sublimated in renunciation, that is into real love.

La eternidad amorosa dura pocos años.

Kings who personify an idea should not, cannot, fall below a certain level for generations; if they do, the idea suffers too.

Later the brothers had quarrelled, one of those family quarrels we all know with deeply entangled roots, impossible to cure because neither side speaks out clearly, each having much to hide.

All Sicilian expression, even the most violent, is really wish fulfillment: our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death; our laziness, our spiced and drugged sherbets, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is, for death again; our meditative air is that of a void wanting to scrutinize the enigmas of nirvana.

The truth is that he wanted to draw a little comfort from gazing at the stars. There were still one or two up there, at the zenith. As always, seeing them revived him; they were distant, they were omnipotent and at the same time they were docile to his calculations; just the contrary to humans, always too near, so weak and yet so quarrelsome.

Si queremos que todo siga como está, es preciso que todo cambie

In Sicily it doesn’t matter whether things are done well or done badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of ‘doing’ at all.

...waking at very early dawn amid all that sweat and stink, he had found himself comparing this ghastly journey with his own life, which had first moved over smiling level ground, then clambered up rocky mountains, slid over threatening passes, to emerge eventually into a landscape of interminable undulations, all of the same color, all bare as despair. These early morning fantasies were the very worst that could happen to a man of middle age; and although the Prince knew that they would vanish with the day's activities, he suffered acutely all the same, as he was used enough to them by now to realize that deep inside him they left a sediment of grief which, accumulating day by day, would in the end be the real cause of his death.

The wealth of many centuries had been transmitted into ornament, luxury, pleasure; no more; the abolition of feudal rights had swept away duties as well as privileges; wealth, like an old wine, had let the dregs of greed, even of care and prudence, fall to the bottom of the barrel, leaving only verve and color.

Good manners apart, though, the appearance of those monumental dishes of macaroni was worthy of the quivers of admiration they evoked. The burnished gold of the crusts, the fragrance of sugar and cinnamon they exuded, were but preludes to the delights released from the interior when the knife broke the crust; first came a mist laden with aromas, then chicken livers, hard-boiled eggs, sliced ham, chicken, and truffles in masses of piping hot, glistening macaroni, to which the meat juice gave an exquisite hue of suède.

Como siempre, la consideración de su muerte lo serenaba tanto como lo turbaba la muerte de los demás. Tal vez porque, a fin de cuentas, su muerte era el final del mundo.

And the Prince, who had found Donnafugata unchanged, was found very much changed himself, for never before would he have issued so cordial an invitation; and from that moment, invisibly, began the decline of his prestige.

Now the road was crossing orange groves in flower, and the nuptial scent of the blossoms absorbed the rest as a full moon does a landscape; the smell of sweating horses, the smell of leather from the carriage upholstery, the smell of Prince and the smell of Jesuit, were all cancelled out by that Islamic perfume evoking houris and fleshly joys beyond the grave.

Nowhere has truth so short a life as in Sicily; a fact has scarcely happened five minutes before its genuine kernel has vanished, been camouflaged, embellished, disfigured, squashed, annihilated by imagination and self-interest; shame, fear, generosity, malice, opportunism, charity, all the passions, good as well as evil, fling themselves onto the fact and tear it to pieces; very soon it has vanished altogether.

He examined my few books. “Fine, fine. Perhaps you’re less ignorant than you seem. This one here,” he added as he picked up a volume of Shakespeare, “this one here understood something. ‘A sea-change into something rich and strange.’* ‘What potions have I drunk of Siren tears?’”†

¡Vosotros, siempre con vuestros sabores mezclados! ¡El erizo tiene que saber también a limón, el azúcar también a chocolate, el amor también a paraíso!

beyond what we can hope to stroke with these hands of ours we have no obligations

the animal had died tortured by anxious hopes of salvation, imagining it could still escape when it was already caught, just like so many human beings.

Vedi: tu, Bendicò, sei un po' come loro, come le stelle: felicemente incomprensibile, incapace di produrre angoscia

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.

Why, he wondered, did God not want anyone to die with their own face on?

great joys are silent

Nothing could be decently hated except eternity.

Among the papers and refuse swirled about by the wind were a few verses of La Bella Gigugin transformed into a kind a f Arab wail, a fare to which any gay tune sung in Sicily is bound to succumb.

…And in truth, the sun, the seclusion, the nights passed beneath the wheeling stars, the silence, the scant nourishment, the study of remote subjects wove around me a spell that predisposed me to marvels.

His head had been stuffed with the tales of brigands by which Sicilians love to test the nervous resistance of new arrivals, and for a month he saw every usher in his office as a murderer, and every wooden paper cutter on his desk as a dagger; also the oil in the cooking had upset his insides.

That solar hue, that variegation of gleam and shade, made Don Fabrizio's heart ache as he stood black and stiff in a doorway: this eminently patrician room reminded him of country things; the chromatic scale was the same as that of the vast wheat fields around Donnafugata, rapt, begging pity from the tyrannous sun; in this room, too, as on his estates in mid-August, the harvest had been gathered long before, stacked elsewhere, leaving, as here, a sole reminder in the color of the stubble burned and useless now. The notes of the waltz in the warm air seemed to him but a stylization of the incessant winds harping their own sorrows on the parched surfaces, today, yesterday, tomorrow, forever and forever. The crowd of dancers, among whom he could count so many near to him in blood if not in heart, began to seem unreal, made up of that material from which are woven lapsed memories, more elusive even than the stuff of disturbing dreams.

Ovid tells us, in his Metamorphoses, that the young girls who were gathering flowers with Proserpina that fatal day were turned into the Sirens—the bird-bodied golden-feathered singers with female faces of the Homeric tradition—and then went wandering about over land and sea, crying out in search of their vanished playmate.

Kunigaikštis vėl susidūrė su viena Sicilijos mįsle; šioje paslapčių saloje, kur namai aklinai uždarinėti, o valstiečiai tvirtina, kad jie nežino, kaip patekti į jų kaimą, kuris matyti kalvoje, už penkių minučių kelio, - čia, šioje saloje, nors ir labai atkakliai stengiamasi parodyti, kad paslapčių labai daug, neįmanoma ką nors išlaikyti paslaptyje.

Don Fabrizio conocía desde siempre esta sensación. Hacía decenios que sentía cómo el fluido vital, la facultad de existir, la vida en suma, y acaso también la voluntad de continuar viviendo, iban saliendo de él lenta pero continuamente, como los granitos que se amontonan y desfilan uno tras otro, sin prisa pero sin detenerse, ante el estrecho orificio de un reloj de arena.

And yet they are the most beautiful thing you have down there, bloody and cartilaginous, the very image of the female sex, fragrant with salt and seaweed. Typhus, typhus! They’re dangerous as all gifts from the sea are; the sea offers death as well as immortality. In Syracuse I demanded that Orsi order them immediately. What flavor! How divine in appearance! My most beautiful memory of the last fifty years!

Un hombre de cuarenta y cinco años puede creerse joven todavía hasta el momento en que se da cuenta de que tiene hijas en edad de amar. El príncipe se sintió súbitamente envejecido. Olvidó las millas que recorría cazando, los «Jesús María» que sabía provocar, la propia lozanía actual al final de un largo y penoso viaje. De pronto se vio a sí mismo como una persona canosa que acompaña un cortejo de nietos a caballo en las cabras de Villa Giulia.

the Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery; every invasion by outsiders, whether so by origin or, if Sicilian, by independence of spirit, upsets their illusion of achieved perfection, risks disturbing their satisfied waiting for nothing; having been trampled on by a dozen different peoples, they consider they have an imperial past which gives them a right to a grand funeral. Do

So begriff Don Calogero allmählich, dass eine gemeinsame Mahlzeit nicht unbedingt ein Orkan von Kaugeräuschen und Fettspritzern sein muss, dass ein Gespräch sehr gut auch anders als ein Streit unter Hunden ablaufen kann, dass einer Frau den Vortritt zu lassen ein Zeichen von Stärke ist und nicht von Schwäche, wie er gemeint hatte; dass man bei einem Gesprächspartner mehr erreichen kann, wenn man zu ihm sagt: »Vielleicht habe ich mich nicht gut ausgedrückt«, anstatt »Du hast überhaupt nix kapiert«, und dass, wenn man solche Taktiken anwendet, Mahlzeiten, Frauen, Argumente und Gesprächspartner etwas hinzugewinnen, was voll und ganz zum Vorteil dessen gereicht, der sie gut behandelt.

[...] Vennero a casa, [...]. Rimasero estasiati dal panorama, dalla irruenza della luce; confessarono però che erano stati pietrificati osservando lo squallore, la vetustà, il sudiciume delle strade di accesso. Non spiegai loro che una cosa era derivata dall'altra, come ho tentato di fare a lei. Uno di loro, poi, mi chiese che cosa veramente venissero a fare, qui in Sicilia, quei volontari italiani. 'They are coming to teach us good manners' risposi 'but won't succeed, because we are gods.' [...] I Siciliani non vorranno mai migliorare per la semplice ragione che credono di essere perfetti: la loro vanità è più forte della loro miseria; ogni intromissione di estranei sia per origine sia anche, se si tratti di Siciliani, per indipendenza di spirito, sconvolge il loro vaneggiare di raggiunta compiutezza, rischia di turbare la loro compiaciuta attesa del nulla; calpestati da una diecina di popoli differenti essi credono di avere un passato imperiale che dà loro diritto a funerali sontuosi. [...] La Sicilia ha voluto dormire, a dispetto delle loro invocazioni; perché avrebbe dovuto ascoltarli se è ricca, se è saggia, se è onesta, se è da tutti ammirata e invidiata, se è perfetta, in una parola? "Adesso anche da noi si va dicendo [...] che la colpa del cattivo stato delle cose, qui ed altrove, è del fedaulismo; mia cioè, per così dire. Sarà. Ma il feudalismo c'è stato dappertutto, le invasioni straniere pure. [...] I risultati intanto sono diversi. La ragione della diversità deve trovarsi in quel senso di superiorità che barbaglia in ogni occhio siciliano, che noi stessi chiamiamo fierezza, che in realtà è cecità. [...]

The unhappy priest was breathing hard; sincere horror at the foreseen dispersal of Church property was linked with regret at his having lost control of himself again, with fear of offending the Prince, whom he genuinely liked and whose blustering rages as well as disinterested kindness he knew well. So he sat down warily, glancing every now and again at Don Fabrizio, who had taken up a little brush and was cleaning the knobs of a telescope, apparently absorbed. A little later he got up and cleaned his hands thoroughly with a rag; his face was quite expressionless, his light eyes seemed intent only on finding any remaining stain of oil in the cuticles of his nails. Down below, around the villa, all was luminous and grandiose silence, emphasised rather than disturbed by the distant barking of Bendicò baiting the gardener’s dog at the far end of the lemon-grove, and by the dull rhythmic beat from the kitchen of a cook’s knife chopping meat for the approaching meal. The sun had absorbed the turbulence of men as well as the harshness of earth. The Prince moved towards the priest’s table, sat down and began drawing pointed little Bourbon lilies with a carefully sharpened pencil which the Jesuit had left behind in his anger. He looked serious but so serene that Father Pirrone no longer felt on tenterhooks. “We’re not blind, my dear Father, we’re just human beings. We live in a changing reality to which we try to adapt ourselves like seaweed bending under the pressure of water. Holy Church has been granted an explicit promise of immortality; we, as a social class, have not. Any palliative which may give us another hundred years of life is like eternity to us. We may worry about our children and perhaps our grandchildren; but beyond what we can hope to stroke with these hands of ours we have no obligations. I cannot worry myself about what will happen to any possible descendants in the year 1960. The Church, yes, She must worry for She is destined not to die. Solace is implicit in Her desperation. Don’t you think that if now or in the future She could save herself by sacrificing us She wouldn’t do so? Of course She would, and rightly.

Un uomo di quarantacinque anni può credersi ancora giovane fino al momento in cui si accorge di avere dei figli in età di amare. Il

THE RAINS had come, the rains had gone, and the sun was back on its throne like an absolute monarch kept off it for a week by his subjects’ barricades, and now reigning once again, choleric but under constitutional restraint. The heat braced without burning, the light domineered but let colors live; from the soil cautiously sprouted clover and mint, and on faces appeared diffident hopes. "Il Gattopardo.

i Siciliani non vorranno mai migliorare per la semplice ragione che credono di essere perfetti: la

Bullshit, la Sicilia non esiste, gli sentiamo dire in tono piuttosto agitato dalla cucina. Io lo so perché ci sono nato. Senza offesa, bro', ma è tutta la sera che dici cazzate. Cosa succede?, chiedo, portando in tavola il pesce che Pupetta ha preparato per secondo. Dice Sicilia, e tz, fa tz con la bocca, l'amico americano. E basta, cazzo. Ma non si possono più sentire queste storie sulla specialità di quest'isola di merda. Come se in Sardegna non ci fosse il mare, come se in Irlanda non avessero la campagna, come se in Australia non ci battesse il sole. Tesoro, sono cazzate. Ha bevuto un po' troppo, cerca di spiegare Pupetta al fidanzato. [...] No, no, lascialo continuare, dice però John, è interessante, quando i siciliani si arrabbiano è interessante, mi ricordano certi personaggi di Pirandello. Pirandello fa cacare, dice Gaga. Tomasi di Lampedusa fa cacare. E Camilleri, anche Camilleri fa cacare?, chiede l'americano. Camilleri è il male assoluto. Dovrebbero imprigionarlo e rileggerli tutti i romanzi di Montalbano fino a che non implori pietà. Bisognerebbe mettere mano alla pistola ogni volta che qualcuno dice della splendida decadenza de dell'irrimediabilità di questo posto, come fanno Camilleri Pirandello Tomasi. Bisognerebbe appiccare il fuoco, incendiare tutto, la, togliere ogni punto di riferimento agli isolani e al resto del mondo. Bisognerebbe, ecco, bisognerebbe che qualcuno si decidesse a scrivere un piccolo manuale per organizzare una guerra lampo, radere al suolo la Sicilia e resettare la mente di quelli un po' cretini come te. Senza offesa, tesoro, era solo un esempio.

The burnished gold of the crusts, the fragrance of sugar and cinnamon they exuded, were but preludes to the delights released from the interior when the knife broke the crust; first came a spice-laden haze, then chicken livers, hard boiled eggs, sliced ham, chicken and truffles in masses of piping hot, glistening macaroni, to which the meat juice gave an exquisite hue of suede.

Τους αρχόντους δεν τους καταλαβαίνει κανείς εύκολα. Ζούνε σένα δικό τους κόσμοφτιαγμένο όχι απευθείας από το Δημιουργό αλλά από τη δική τους κοινωνική τάξη μετά από πολλούς αιώνες συσσώρευσης εκλεκτών βιωμάτων, βασάνων και τέρψεων. Έχουν μια πολύ ισχυρή συλλογική μνήμη κατα συνέπεια δυσαρεστούνται με πράγματα που εσάς και μένα δε μας νοιάζουν καθόλου. Γι αυτούς όμως είναι ζωτικά γιατί σχετίζονται με αυτή την κληρονομιά αναμνήσεων ελπίδων και φόβων της κάστας τους.....

...πως οι αρχοντες δεν κάνουν καλά που περιφρονούν τους άλλους πως όλοι μας υφιστάμεθα τη διπλή σκλαβιά της αγάπης και του θανάτου και πως είμαστε όλοι ίσοι ενώπιον του κυρίου.....

...ψηλά στον ουρανό υπήρχαν μερικά αστέρια στο ζενίθ.Όπωςπάντα η θέα τους τον εμψύχωνε. Ήταν μακρινά, παντοδύναμα και ταυτόχρονα υπάκουα στους υπολογισμούς του το αντίθετο ακριβώς των ανθρώπων, πουωήταν πάντα πολύ κοντινοί , αδύναμοι και παρ όλα αυτά ατίθασοι...

I am without illusions; what would the Senate do with me, an inexperienced legislator who lacks the faculty of self-deception, essential requisite for wanting to guide others?

Your sort, always combining flavors! Sea urchins have to taste also like lemon, sugar also like chocolate, love also like paradise!

solo hay un pecado, el pecado original; y era demasiado tarde para confesarlo.

ahora, precisamente cuando –después de tantas décadas– los recuerdos resucitaban, ya no podía recurrir al consuelo de culpar a otros por su infelicidad; ni siquiera le quedaba ese consuelo que es el último, y engañoso, elixir con que se embriagan los desesperados.

schienen, wurden von Don Calogero im Handumdrehen gelöst; unbelastet von den hundert Fesseln, die Ehrlichkeit, Anstand und womöglich auch gute Erziehung dem Handeln vieler anderer Menschen anlegen, bewegte er sich im Urwald des Lebens mit der Sicherheit eines Elefanten, der unbeirrt geradeaus marschiert, Bäume entwurzelt und Hütten zertrampelt, ohne die Dornenkratzer und das Jaulen der Plattgetretenen auch nur wahrzunehmen.

Para la criatura humana no hay más placer que el de gritar "¡la culpa es tuya!

Como siempre que reflexionaba sobre su muerte, se tranquilizó: tanto como se había alterado al pensar en la muerte de los otros; ¿acaso, porque, al fin y al cabo, su muerte era antes que nada la muerte del mundo entero?

Wer weiß, ob sie sich da oben in Mailand jemals wohlfühlen würde – in diesem schrecklichen Kaff, wo man, wenn man einen Teller Makkaroni essen will, eine Woche vorher dran denken muss!«

We’re not blind in spirit, Father. We’re just human beings in a changing world”. Il gattopardo

We’re not blind in spirit, Father. We’re just human beings in a changing world

those poets the French incubate and forget next week.

in spite of the ostentatious show of mystery, reserve is a myth.

Those were years when novels were helping to form those literary myths which still dominate European minds today; but in Sicily, partly because of its traditional impermeability to anything new, partly because of the general ignorance of any language whatsoever, partly also, it must be said, because of a nagging and strict Bourbon censorship which worked through the Customs, no one had heard of Dickens, Eliot, Sand, Flaubert, or even Dumas. A couple of Balzac’s volumes had, through various subterfuges, it is true, reached the hands of Don Fabrizio, who had appointed himself family censor; he had read them and then lent them, in disgust, to a friend he didn’t like, saying that they were by a writer with a talent undoubtedly vigorous but also extravagant and “obsessed” (today he would have said “monomaniacal”): a hasty judgment, obviously, but not without a certain acuteness.

Between the pride and intellectuality of his mother and the sensuality and irresponsibility of his father, poor Prince Fabrizio lived in perpetual discontent under his Jovelike frown, watching the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever making, still less wanting to make, any move toward saving it.

then she’s Sicilian to the very marrow: she’s never left here; she might never feel at home in a place where one has to arrange a week ahead for a plate of macaroni!

we Sicilians have become accustomed, by a long, a very long hegemony of rulers who were not of our religion and who did not speak our language, to split hairs. If we had not done so we’d never have coped with Byzantine tax gatherers, with Berber Emirs, with Spanish Viceroys.

In Sicily it doesn’t matter whether things are done well or done badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of ‘doing’ at all. We are old, Chevalley, very old. For more than twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of a superb and heterogeneous civilization, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own. We’re as white as you are, Chevalley, and as the Queen of England; and yet for two thousand and five hundred years we’ve been a colony. I don’t say that in complaint; it’s our fault. But even so we’re worn out and exhausted.

But that is all over now, isn’t it? Now Sicily is no longer a conquered land, but a free part of a free State.

Sleep, my dear Chevalley, sleep, that is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them, even in order to bring them the most wonderful of gifts; and I must say, between ourselves, I have strong doubts whether the new Kingdom will have many gifts for us in its luggage.

All Sicilian expression, even the most violent, is really wish-fulfillment: our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death; our laziness, our spiced and drugged sherbets, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is, for death again; our meditative air is that of a void wanting to scrutinize the enigmas of nirvana. That is what gives power to certain people among us, to those who are half awake: that is the cause of the well-known time lag of a century in our artistic and intellectual life; novelties attract us only when they are dead, incapable of arousing vital currents; that is what gives rise to the extraordinary phenomenon of the constant formation of myths which would be venerable if they were really ancient, but which are really nothing but sinister attempts to plunge us back into a past that attracts us only because it is dead.

I said Sicilians, I should have added Sicily, the atmosphere, the climate, the landscape of Sicily. Those are the forces which have formed our minds together with and perhaps more than foreign dominations and ill-assorted rapes; this landscape which knows no mean between sensuous slackness and hellish drought; which is never petty, never ordinary, never relaxed, as a country made for rational beings to live in should be; this country of ours in which the inferno around Randazzo is a few miles from the loveliness of Taormina Bay; this climate which inflicts us with six feverish months at a temperature of a hundred and four;

May, June, July, August, September, October; six times thirty days of sun sheer down on our heads; this summer of ours which is as long and glum as a Russian winter and against which we struggle with less success; you don’t know it yet, but fire could be said to snow down on us as on the accursed cities of the Bible; if a Sicilian worked hard in any of those months he would expend energy enough for three; then water is either lacking altogether or has to be carried from so far that every drop is paid for by a drop of sweat; and then the rains, which are always tempestuous and set dry river beds to frenzy, drown beasts and men on the very spot where two weeks before both had been dying of thirst. “This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and these monuments, even, of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing around like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction, who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn’t understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind.

I don’t deny that a few Sicilians may succeed in breaking the spell, once off the island; but they would have to leave it very young; by twenty it’s too late: the crust is formed; they will remain convinced that their country is basely calumniated, like all other countries, that the civilized norm is here, the oddities are elsewhere.

These are things one can’t say to a Sicilian; and if you’d said them yourself, I too would have objected.

Brakes, my dear fellow, brakes, that’s what you need! You Sicilians have so few of them!

Why, he wondered, did God not want anyone to die with his own face on? For the same happens to us all: we all die with a mask on our features; even the young;

dying on a hotel balcony. For the significance of a noble family lies entirely in its traditions, that is in its vital memories; and he was the last to have any unusual memories, anything different from those of other families.

Only water is really good,” he thought like a true Sicilian, and did not dry the drops left on his lips.

I belong to an unfortunate generation, swung between the old world and the new, and I find myself ill at ease in both.

If we want everything to stay as it is, everything has to change.

They can allow themselves to be a bit nice to us, as they’re so sure to be free of us the day of our funerals.

El amor. Claro, el amor. Un año de ardor y llamas, y luego treinta de cenizas. Ya sabía muy bien él qué era el amor... y además Tancredi, ante quien las mujeres caerían como fruta madura...

«Mientras hay muerte hay esperanza», pensó; luego se sintió ridículo por haberse

Pasaban las horas y no podía dormirse: la poderosa mano de Dios mezclaba tres fuegos en sus pensamientos: el de las caricias de Mariannina, el de los versos del desconocido, el iracundo fuego de las hogueras encendidas en la montaña. Hacia el alba, sin

«Si nosotros no participamos también, esos tipos son capaces de encajarnos la república. Si queremos que todo siga igual, es necesario que todo cambie.