Izzo Quotes

Sometimes, all it takes is one gesture, one word, to change the course of someone's life. Even if you know it won't last forever.

Να τα βρεις με τη ζωή σημαίνει να τα βρεις με τις αναμνήσεις σου... Ν' αναρωτιέσαι για το παρελθόν δε χρησιμεύει πουθενά. Τις ερωτήσεις πρέπει να τις απευθύνουμε στο μέλλον.

The sensuality of desperate lives. Only poets talk like that. But poetry has never had an answer for anything. All it does it bear witness. To despair. And desperate lives.

You've got to rely on people. I know you're hurting because of all the bad things that have happened to you, but in order to live, truly live, you've got to feel pain, you've got to trust, and you've got to love.

Pleasure involves respect, and respect starts with words.

I don't like answering private questions. The answers are often ambiguous and can be interpreted in different ways. Even when the other person is close to you.

Money may not buy happiness, but it buys a hell of a lot of distraction from unhappiness

So much violence. If God existed, I'd have strangled him on the spot. Without batting an eyelid. And with all the fury of the damned.

Dawn is merely an illusion that the world is beautiful.

Classic romance dilemma: you always want the man you can't have, and you never want the man that wants you.

Πυγμαχία δεν είναι μόνο να χτυπάς. Το πρώτο που πρέπει να μάθεις είναι να δέχεσαι χτυπήματα. Να τα αντέχεις. Και να φροντίζεις ώστε να σου κάνουν το μικρότερο δυνατό κακό. Η ζωή τίποτε άλλο δεν είναι από μια σειρά γύρων, ο ένας μετά τον άλλο. Να τρως και να δίνεις γροθιές, ξανά και ξανά. Να τις αντέχεις. Να μη λυγίζεις. Και να βαράς εκεί που πρέπει , τη στιγμή που πρέπει.

...I understand where you're coming from. I know it isn't just a question of revenge. It's the feeling there are some things you can't let pass. If you did, you wouldn't be able to look at yourself in the mirror afterwards.

Days are only beautiful early in the morning. I should have remembered that. Dawn is merely an illusion that the world is beautiful. When the world opens its eyes, reality reasserts itself, and you're back with the same old shit.

Marseilles isn't a city for tourists. There's nothing to see. Its beauty can't be photographed. It can only be shared. It's a place where you have to take sides, be passionately for or against. Only then can you see what there is to see. And you realize, too late, that you're in the middle of a tragedy. An ancient tragedy in which the hero is death. In Marseilles, even to lose you have to know how to fight.

Why was it so difficult to make new friends once you were past forty Was it because we didn't have dreams anymore, only regrets?

Happiness. One day. Ten thousand years ago.

Leila was untouchable. She was in my heart now, and I'd carry her always, on this earth that every day gives men a chance.

I felt suffocated. And alone. More alone than ever. Every year, I ostentatiously crossed out of my address book any friend who'd made a racist remark, neglected those whose only ambition was a new car and a Club Med vacation, and forgot all those who played the Lottery. I loved fishing and silence. Walking the hills. Drinking cold Cassis, Lagavulin, or Oban late into the night. I didn't talk much. Had opinions about everything. Life and death. Good and evil. I was a film buff. Loved music. I'd stopped reading contemporary novels. More than anything, I loathed half-hearted, spineless people.

Nobody was speaking. Only the cicadas continued their whine, indifferent to human tragedies.

It's at moment of misfortune that we remember we're all exiles.

Ordinary French people. Citizens of fear.

The one thing I could give them was a smile. I've always been good at smiles.

Killing was easy. Dying was something else.

A breeze, briefly gentle but growing more savage, jostled the potted plants and curios that cluttered the room.

Only the cicadas continued their whine, indifferent to human tragedies.

We’re slaves, not idiots. That’s all you have to understand.

Her fingers were burning hot. I felt as if she was branding me. For life.

I was the last, the sole survivor. The most honorable thing a survivor could do was survive. If you stayed on your feet, stayed alive, you were the winner.

The novels, travel books and poems I read had a particular smell. The smell of cellars. An almost spicy smell, a mixture of dust and grease. Verdigris. Books today don't have a smell. They don't even smell of print.

Of course, every new caress would only have taken us closer to the inevitable: break-ups, tears, disillusionment, sadness, anguish, loathing. It wouldn’t have made the slightest difference to the mess that human beings make of this world.

I meant to learn something,” Sophie said, impatient. “Something else than embroidery or dancing, or playing pretty tunes on the pianoforte. I am not a decorative object, Father. I have an intellect, also, and I wish to make good use of it.

You ought to get out more. You know, Pérol, we should go out some evening, just you and me. Otherwise, you lose touch with reality. You know what I mean? You lose your sense of reality, and hey presto, you don't know which shelf you left your soul on. The shelf where you put your friends. The shelf where you put your women. Stage right, stage left. Or in the shoebox. You turn around and you find you're stuck in the bottom drawer, with the accessories.

From a brain perspective, every time we do something we are more likely to do it again, and every time we stop ourselves from doing something we are less likely to do it again.

We fought over a girl's smile, not because of the color of our skins. It created friendships, not hatreds.

What is the difference between good and great? "Sacrifice

The future cannot be controlled, only experienced.

But poetry has never had an answer for anything. All it does is bear witness. To despair. And desperate lives.

Do the little things right to reach the big goals.

After that, we weren't the same anymore. We'd become men. Disillusioned and cynical. Slightly bitter too. We had nothing. We hadn't even learned a trade. No future. Nothing but life. But life without a future is worse than no life at all.

After the love, I went back on the other side of my border. Back to the territory where I have my own rules, my own laws, my own code, and my own stupid obsessions. The territory where I lose my way, and where I lost the women who ventured onto

We were all moving to a pre-ordained end. You just had to open the papers and read the international news, or the crime reports. We didn't need nuclear weapons. We were killing each other with prehistoric savagery. We were just dinosaurs, and the worst thing of all was that we knew it.

Our taste for books came from Antonin, an old second-hand bookseller, an anarchist, whose shop was on Cours Julien. We'd cut classes to go see him. He'd tell us stories of adventures and pirates. The Caribbean. The Red Sea. The South Seas... Sometimes he'd stop, grab a book, and read us a passage. As if to prove that what he was telling us was true. Then he'd give it to us as a present.

Marseille ist keine Stadt für Touristen. Es gibt dort nichts zu sehen. Seine Schönheit lässt sich nicht fotografieren. Sie teilt sich mit. Hier muss man Partei ergreifen. Sich engagieren. Dafür oder dagegen sein. Leidenschaftlich sein. Erst dann wird sichtbar, was es zu sehen gibt. Und dann ist man, wenn auch zu spät, mitten in einem Drama. Einem antiken Drama, in dem der Held der Tod ist. In Marseille muss man sogar kämpfen, um zu verlieren.

Se le vie marittime non si lasciano circoscrivere facilmente forse è perché sono intrecciate di racconti e le leggende: le carte su cui sono state segnate sono forse immaginarie, gli scritti che le accompagnano inventati

Il mediterraneo non è solo geografia. Non è solo storia. Ma è più di una semplice appartenenza.

Victims are also less likely to take initiative because they feel outcomes are not in their hands anyway. An organization filled with victims will generally have low morale, have more risk-averse behavior, and find it difficult to implement change.

I spent months fighting the fact that she had a personality disorder, but everything changed when I started asking myself how I had to adapt to work with a boss like her.

The greatest tragedy in life is to spend your whole life fishing only to discover that it was not fish you were after.

Perché non riusciva a decidersi? Che cosa ci guadagnava a stare in mare, lontano da chi amava? Quale maledizione aveva colpito lui e tanti altri, che non trovavano il senso della vita se non lontano da ogni attracco?

Thoughts and words are the powerful beginning of a chain that defines how we live

Thoughts and words are the powerful beginning of a chain that defines how we live.

In a world where you can be anything... be kind!

Di fronte al mare la felicità è un’idea semplice

Chez Mario. Une assiette de mozzarella et tomates, avec câpres, anchois et olives noires. Un plat de spaghetti aux clovisses. Un tiramisu. Le tout arrosé d'un bandol du domaine de Pibarnon.

Les Marseillais n'aiment pas les voyages. Tout le monde les croit marins, aventuriers, que leur père ou leur grand-père a fait le tour du monde, au moins une fois. Au mieux, ils étaient allés jusqu'à Niolon, ou au Cap Croisette. Dans les familles bourgeoises, la mer était interdite aux enfants. Le port permettait les affaires, mais la mer, c'était sale. C'est par là qu'arrivait le vice. Et la peste. Dès les beaux jours, on partait vivre dans les terres. Aix et sa campagne, ses mas et ses bastides. La mer, on la laissait aux pauvres.

Pour l'aïoli, Céleste n'avait d'égale qu'Honorine. La morue était dessalée à point. Ce qui est rare. Habituellement, elle trempe trop, en deux eaux seulement. Plusieurs eaux étaient préférables. Une fois huit heures, puis trois fois deux heures. Il convenait aussi de la pocher à l'eau frémissante, avec du fenouil et des grains de poivre. Céleste avait aussi son huile d'olive pour "monter" l'aïoli. Du moulin Rossi, à Mouriès.

Il y a bien eu un sursaut, au début du millénaire, avec la littérature policière. La vraie, celle qui tentait de recréer une mythologie de notre époque, les livres de Jean-Claude Izzo et les valeurs de vivre à Marseille, de Leonardo Padura et les soubresauts de l’histoire à travers les rues de La Havane, les romans absolument postmodernes et tellement jubilatoires de Daniel Pennac, la profondeur de l’épopée humaine d’Ed McBain.

Happiness is not in what is happening; it is in how I process what is happening.

Outside, it still smelled bad. I couldn’t do anything about that. Neither could anyone. It was called life: a cocktail of love and hate, strength and weakness, violence and passivity.

letting myself be transported by her smile, the shape of her lips, the dimples in her cheeks, the astonishing mobility of her face. Looking at her, and feeling her knee against mine, gave me a chance not to think.

After the love, I went back on the other side of my border. Back to the territory where I have my own rules, my own laws, my own code, and my own stupid obsessions. The territory where I lose my way, and where I lost the women who ventured onto it.

That sense of some distant, unknown country from where she’d come and toward which she seemed to want to return.

Si ricordò di alcune riflessioni che aveva annotato di recente sul suo quadernetto. A proposito della povertà di vocabolario riguardante il mare. Solo i greci avevano tante parole per definirlo. Hals, il sale, il mare in quanto materia. Pelagos, la distesa d'acqua, il mare come visione, spettacolo. Pontos, il mare spazio e via di comunicazione. Thalassa, il mare in quanto evento. Kolpos, lo spazio marittimo che abbraccia la riva, il golfo o la baia...

comme beaucoup de Marseillais, les récits de voyages me comblaient plus que les voyages eaux-mêmes / come molti marsigliesi, i racconti di viaggi mi incantavano più dei viaggi stessi.

Life lived for tomorrow will always be just a day away from being realized. —Leo Buscaglia

adversity introduces us to ourselves,

Be careful of your thoughts, because your thoughts become your words. Be careful with your words, because your words become your actions. Be careful of your actions, because your actions become your habits. Be careful of your habits, because your habits become your character. And your character becomes your destiny.