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.

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

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.")

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.

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?

Cambiare tutto perché niente cambi.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

La eternidad amorosa dura pocos años.

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

...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.

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.

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.

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?’”†

great joys are silent

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.

Nothing could be decently hated except eternity.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

[...] 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.

Quando aveva tirato fuori l'acqua dal pozzo a molti usi si era guardato un momento nello specchio del secchio e si era trovato a posto, con quella benda nera sull'occhio destro che ormai serviva a ricordare più che a curare la ferita al sopracciglio buscata tre mesi fa ai combattimenti di Palermo; con quell'altro occhio azzurro che sembrava aver assunto l'incarico di esprimere la malizia anche di quello temporaneamente eclissato; col filetto scarlatto al di sopra della cravatta che discretamente alludeva alla camicia rossa che aveva portato.

Don Fabrizio remembered a conversation with Father Pirrone some months before in the sunlit observatory. What the Jesuit had predicted had come to pass. But wasn’t it perhaps good tactics to insert himself into the new movement, make at least part use of it for a few members of his own class? The worry of his imminent interview with Don Calogero lessened. “But the rest of his family, Don Ciccio, what are they really like?” “Excellency, no one has laid eyes on Don Calogero’s wife for years, except me. She only leaves the house to go to early Mass, the five o’clock one, when it’s empty. There’s no organ-playing at that hour; but once I got up early just to see her. Donna Bastiana came in with her maid, and as I was hiding behind a confessional I could not see very much; but at the end of Mass the heat was too great for the poor woman and she took off her black veil. Word of honour, Excellency, she was lovely as the sun, one can’t blame Don Calogero, who’s a beetle of a man, for wanting to keep her away from others. But even in the best kept houses secrets come out; servants talk; and it seems Donna Bastiana is a kind of animal: she can’t read or write or tell the time by a clock, can scarcely talk; just a beautiful mare, voluptuous and uncouth; she’s incapable even of affection for her own daughter! Good for bed and that’s all.” Don Ciccio, who, as protégé of queens and follower of princes, considered his own simple manners to be perfect, smiled with pleasure. He had found a way of getting some of his own back on the suppressor of his personality. “Anyway,” he went on, “one couldn’t expect much else. You know whose daughter Donna Bastiana is, Excellency?” He turned, rose on tiptoe, pointed to a distant group of huts which looked as if they were slithering off the edge of the hill, nailed there just by a wretched-looking bell-tower: a crucified hamlet. “She’s the daughter of one of your peasants from Runci, Peppe Giunta he was called, so filthy and so crude that everyone called him Peppe “Mmerda” . . . excuse the word, Excellency.” Satisfied, he twisted one of Teresina’s ears round a finger. “Two years after Don Calogero had eloped with Bastiana they found him dead on the path to Rampinzeri, with twelve bullets in his back. Always lucky, is Don Calogero, for the old man was getting above himself and demanding, they say.” Much of this was known to Don Fabrizio and had already been balanced up in his mind; but the nickname of Angelica’s grandfather was new to him; it opened a profound historical perspective, and made him glimpse other abysses compared to which Don Calogero himself seemed a garden flowerbed. The Prince began to feel the ground giving way under his feet; how ever could Tancredi swallow this? And what about himself? He found himself trying to work out the relationship between the Prince of Salina, uncle of the bridegroom, and the grandfather of the bride; he found none, there wasn’t any. Angelica was just Angelica, a flower of a girl, a rose merely fertilised by her grandfather’s nickname. Non olet, he repeated, non olet; in fact optime foeminam ac contuberninum olet.

Then one of them asked me what those Italian volunteers were really coming to do in Sicily. ‘They are coming to teach us good manners,’ I replied in English. ‘But they won’t succeed, because we think we are gods.’ “I don’t think they understood, but they laughed and went off. That is my answer to you too, my dear Chevalley: 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.

In the livid light of five-thirty in the morning Donnafugata was deserted and apparently despairing. In front of every house the refuse of squalid meals accumulated along leprous walls; trembling dogs were routing about with a greed that was always disappointed. An occasional door was already open and the smell of sleep spread out into the street; by glimmering wicks mothers scrutinized the eyelids of their children for trachoma; almost all were in mourning, and many had been the wives of those carcasses one stumbles over on the turns of mountain tracks. The men were coming out gripping their hoes to look for someone who might give them work, God willing; subdued silence alternated with exasperated screams of hysterical voices; away over toward the Convent of the Holy Spirit a tin-colored dawn was beginning to tinge leaden clouds.

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 straightaway 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.

a past that attracts us only because it is dead.

…death was purely an intellectual concept, a fact of knowledge as it were and no more, not an experience that pierced the marrow of their bones.

Better bore oneself than to bore others.

Black suits you perfectly. But what are you looking at? Are you courting death?

Era un jardín para ciegos: allí la vista no encontraba más que ofensas; el olfato, en cambio, un manantial de placeres, si no delicados

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

dispositivos secretos que ya nadie sabía hacer funcionar salvo los ladrones.

El amor. Claro, el amor. Un año de ardor y llamas, y luego treinta de cenizas.

Y Concetta, con todas sus virtudes pasivas, ¿sería capaz de ayudar a un marido brillante y ambicioso que quería subir por los resbaladizos escalones de la nueva sociedad? ¡Ella, que es tan tímida y reservada, tan retraída! Siempre sería la bella colegiala de entonces, es decir una bola de plomo encadenada al pie de su marido.

De verdad estaban contentos: ella por haberse colocado y haber podido agenciarse aquel hermoso macho; él, por haber seguido los consejos del padre y haberse ganado una criada y medio almendral.

Algo debe cambiar para que todo siga igual.

Tutto deve cambiare affinché nulla cambi

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.

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

Dickens, Eliot, Sand, Flaubert, or even Dumas. A couple of Balzac’s volumes had, through various

The thought occurred to Don Fabrizio that it was inner ignorance of this supreme consolation which makes the young feel sorrows much more sharply than the old; the latter are nearer the safety exit.

free as he was from the shackles imposed on many other men by honesty, decency, and plain good manners, he moved through the jungle of life with the confidence of an elephant which advances in a straight line, rooting up trees and trampling down lairs, without even noticing scratches of thorns and moans from the crushed.

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.

Again the Prince found himself facing one of the enigmas of Sicily; in this secret island, where houses are barred and peasants refuse to admit they even know the way to their own village in clear view on a hillock within a few minutes’ walk from here, in spite of the ostentatious show of mystery, reserve is a myth.

Dying for somebody or for something, that was perfectly normal, of course; but the person dying should know, or at least feel sure, that someone knows for whom or for what he is dying; the disfigured face was asking just that; and that was where the haze began.

Much would happen, but all would be playacting; a noisy, romantic play with a few spots of blood on the comic costumes. This was a country of arrangements, with none of that frenzy of the French;

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?

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.

...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...

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.....

عندما يصل المرء إلى سن معينة تتمثل له آلامه كل يوم في موعدها الدقيق

استمرت لا تسمع شيئًا، لقد كان الخواء كاملًا في داخلها

She was tall and well-made, on an ample scale; her skin looked as if it had the flavour of fresh cream which it resembled, her childlike mouth that of strawberries. Under a mass of raven hair, curling in gentle waves, her green eyes gleamed motionless as those of statues, and like them a little cruel. She was moving slowly, making her wide white skirt rotate around her, and emanating from her whole person the invincible calm of a woman sure of her own beauty.

In fact with his low forehead, ornamental quiffs of hair on the temples, lurching walk and perpetual swelling of the right trouser pocket where he kept a knife, it was obvious at once that Vincenzino was "a man of honour," one of those violent cretins capable of any havoc.

In her wake came Don Calogero, a rat escorting a rose: though his clothes had no elegance this time they were at least decent.

There had been no enemies, just one single adversary, herself; her future had been killed by her own imprudence, by the reckless Salina pride; and now, just at the moment when her memories had come alive again after so many years, she found herself even without the solace of being able to blame her own unhappiness on others, a solace which is the last protective device of the desperate.

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

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.