Under The Tuscan Sun Quotes

Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.

Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different.

Where you are is who you are. The further inside you the place moves, the more your identity is intertwined with it. Never casual, the choice of place is the choice of something you crave.

There is no technique, there is just the way to do it. Now, are we going to measure or are we going to cook?

I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.

A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.

Splendid to arrive alone in a foreign country and feel the assault of difference. Here they are all along, busy with living; they don't talk or look like me. The rhythm of their day is entirely different; I am foreign.

Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears on a tree just below me. A fine crop coming in. May summer last a hundred years.

Whatever a guidebook says, wether or not you leave somewhere with a sense of the place is entirely a matter of smell and instinct.

My idea of heaven still is to drive the gravel farm roads of Umbria and Tuscany, very pleasantly lost.

We were given one country and we've set up in another.

Do you know the most surprising thing about divorce? It doesn't actually kill you. Like a bullet to the heart or a head-on car wreck. It should. When someone you've promised to cherish till death do you part says "I never loved you," it should kill you instantly. You shouldn't have to wake up day after day after that, trying to understand how in the world you didn't know. The light just never went on, you know. I must have known, of course, but I was too scared to see the truth. Then fear just makes you so stupid.

Like fanning through a deck of cards, my mind flashes on the thousand chances, trivial to profound, that converged to re-create this place. Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different. Where did the expression "a place in the sun" first come from? My rational thought process cling always to the idea of free will, random event; my blood, however, streams easily along a current of fate.

Although he's slight, he has that wiry strength that seems to come more from will than muscle.

The queen bee's life is totally overrated. All she does is lay eggs, lay eggs. She takes one nuptial flight. That one stuns her with enough fertile power to be trapped in the hive forever. The workers—the sexually undeveloped females—have the best life. They have fields of flowers to roll in. Imagine turning over and over inside a rose.

What a strange mind, to cover the real thing with an imitation of something real.

They all agree, Italy is not what it used to be. What is? All my adult life I've heard how Silicon Valley used to be all orchards, how Atlanta used to be genteel, how publishing used to be run by gentlemen, how houses used to cost what a car costs now. All true, but what can you do but live now?

You never know, of course, when you write a book what its fate will be. Sink out of sight, soar to the sun–who knows. I love this quote from Frances Mayes. It pretty much sums up the Great Unknown of book writing.

Stone houses, terrace walls, city walls, streets. Plant any rose and you hit four or five big ones. All the Etruscan sarcophagi with likenesses of the dead carved on top in realistic, living poses must have come out of the most natural transference into death they could imagine. After lifetimes of dealing with stone, why not, in death, turn into it?

One habit: choosing a book and starting each day with a dedicated time of reading and gazing, becoming an apprentice to a mind I admire.

Even gelato, which used to be divine all over Italy, is not dependably good anymore.

Send me out into another life lord because this one is growing faint I do not think it goes all the way.

Don't plant any Peace roses,” a friend and connoisseur of roses advised. “They're such a cliché.” But not only are they dazzling, the vanilla cream, peach, and rosy blush colors repeat the colors of the house.

Finally I caught on that what you buy today is ready—picked or dug this morning at its peak. This also explained another puzzle; I never understood why Italian refrigerators are so minute until I realized that they don't store food the way we do. The Sub-Zero giant I have at home begins to seem almost institutional compared to the toy fridge I now have here.

Instead of winding and skirting, Roman roads tend to go straight to the top. The chariots were light and the shortest distance between two points seemed to have governed their surveyors. I've read that some of their roadbeds go down twelve feet.

I’m not my best, and I had four glasses of wine. If I want to be a sad failure, I can. I got dumped by my fiancé because I’m not perfect and never will be. Love isn’t enough, and time doesn’t heal— " Caroline explaining why she watched Under the Tuscan Sun three times today.

When books go out into the world, they take on a life. Sometimes that life is a quiet and dusty one, waiting on the nether regions of library stacks. I have books of poetry like that. With others, the book's life is one of surprise because the book keeps on making its way, on it's own, into intriguing and larger spaces.

A lifelong insomniac, I sleep like one newly dead every night and dream deeply harmonious dreams of swimming along with the current in a clear green river, playing and at home in the water. On the first night, I dreamed that the real name of the house was not Bramasole but Cento Angeli, One Hundred Angels, and that I would discover them one by one. Is it bad luck to change the name of a house, as it is to rename a boat? As a trepid foreigner, I wouldn't. But for me, the house now has a secret name as well as its own name.

the houses that are important to us are the ones that allow us to dream in peace.

What if you did not feel uncertainty, the white writing says. Are you exempt from doubt? Why not rename it excitement?

Some of the best decisions we make come from that inner voice that says, "Why not?" That says, "Andiamo." So much disappointment arises from what is desired but not chosen.

He's delighted to read what the mayor of Naples says about driving there. Naples is the most chaotic city for drivers on earth. Ed loved it—he got to drive on the sidewalk while the pedestrians filled the street. “A green light is a green light, avanti, avanti,” the mayor explained. “A red light—just a suggestion.” And yellow? he was asked. “Yellow is for gaiety.

I'm mixed on figs. The fleshy quality feels spooky. In Italian, il fico, fig, has a slangy turn into la fica, meaning vulva. Possibly because of the famous fig leaf exodus from Eden, it seems like the most ancient of fruits. Oddest, too—the fig flower is inside the fruit. To pull one open is to look into a complex, primitive, infinitely sophisticated life cycle tableau.

We feel prepared to face the reality of restoration. We walk into town for coffee and telephone Piero Rizzatti, the geometra. The translations “draftsman” or “surveyor” don't quite explain what a geometra is, a professional without an equivalent in the United States—a liaison among owner, builders, and town planning officials. Ian has assured us that he is the best in the area, meaning also that he has the best connections and can get the permits quickly.

Siesta becomes a ritual. We pull in the shutters, leaving the windows open. All over the house, ladders of light fall across the floor. If I am mad enough to take a walk after one-thirty, no one is out, not even a dog. The word torpor comes to mind. All shops close during the sacred three hours. If you need something for bee sting or allergy, too bad. Siesta is prime time for sex, too. Maybe this accounts for the Mediterranean temperament versus the northern; children conceived in the light and children conceived in the dark.

As they clean the walls with wet cloths and sponges, they uncover the earlier paints, most prevalent a stark blue that must have been inspired by Mary's blue robes. Renaissance painters could get that rare color only from ground lapis lazuli brought from quarries in what is now Afghanistan.

The bricked-up fourteenth-century “doors of the dead” are still visible. These ghosts of doors beside the main entrance were designed, some say, to take out the plague victims—bad luck for them to exit by the main entrance. I notice in the regular doors, people often leave their keys in the lock.

We pass the apartment we rented five years ago, when I swore off Florence. In summer, wads of tourists clog the city as if it's a Renaissance theme park. Everyone seems to be eating. That year, a garbage strike persisted for over a week and I began to have thoughts of plague when I passed heaps of rot spilling out of bins. I was amazed that long July when waiters and shopkeepers remained as nice as they did, given what they had to put up with. Everywhere I stepped I was in the way. Humanity seemed ugly—the international young in torn T-shirts and backpacks lounging on steps, bewildered bus tourists dropping ice cream napkins in the street and asking, “How much is that in dollars?” Germans in too-short shorts letting their children terrorize restaurants. The English mother and daughter ordering lasagne verdi and Coke, then complaining because the spinach pasta was green. My own reflection in the window, carrying home all my shoe purchases, the sundress not so flattering. Bad wonderland. Henry James in Florence referred to “one's detested fellow-pilgrim.” Yes, indeed, and it's definitely time to leave when one's own reflection is included. Sad that our century has added no glory to Florence—only mobs and lead hanging in the air.

Go on from here, Ada, please. (She). Billions of boys. Take one fairly decent decade. A billion of Bills, good, gifted, tender and passionate, not only spiritually but physically well-meaning Billions, have bared the jillions of their no less tender and brilliant Jills during that decade, at stations and under conditions that have to be controlled and specified by the worker, lest the entire report be choked up by the weeds of statistics and waist-high generalizations. No point would there be, if we left out, for example, the little matter of prodigious individual awareness and young genius, which makes, in some cases, of this or that particular gasp an unprecedented and unrepeatable event in the continuum of life or at least a thematic anthemia of such events in a work of art, or a denouncer’s article. The details that shine through or shade through: the local leaf through the hyaline skin, the green sun in the brown humid eye, tout ceci, vsyo eto, in tit and toto, must be taken into account, now prepare to take over (no, Ada, go on, ya zaslushalsya: I’m all enchantment and ears), if we wish to convey the fact, the fact, the fact—that among those billions of brilliant couples in one cross section of what you will allow me to call spacetime (for the convenience of reasoning), one couple is a unique super-imperial couple, sverhimperator-skaya cheta, in consequence of which (to be inquired into, to be painted, to be denounced, to be put to music, or to the question and death, if the decade has a scorpion tail after all), the particularities of their love-making influence in a special unique way two long lives and a few readers, those pensive reeds, and their pens and mental paintbrushes. Natural history indeed! Unnatural history—because that precision of senses and sense must seem unpleasantly peculiar to peasants, and because the detail is all: The song of a Tuscan Firecrest or a Sitka Kinglet in a cemetery cypress; a minty whiff of Summer Savory or Yerba Buena on a coastal slope; the dancing flitter of a Holly Blue or an Echo Azure—combined with other birds, flowers and butterflies: that has to be heard, smelled and seen through the transparency of death and ardent beauty. And the most difficult: beauty itself as perceived through the there and then. The males of the firefly (now it’s really your turn, Van).

Семейный девиз... таков: упаковывайся и распаковывайся. И еще: не можешь ехать первым классом, нечего ехать вообще

Что важнее: первичная сущность бытия или холодный чесночный суп? В конце концов, между ними не такая уж большая разница.

batch of obsidian-like fudge, Ashley disdained the kitchen.

Southerners have a gene, as yet undetected in the DNA spirals, that causes them to believe that place is fate. Where you are is who you are. The further inside you the place moves, the more your identity is intertwined with it. Never casual, the choice of place is the choice of something you crave.

You have to churn somewhat when the roof covering your head is at stake, since to sell is to walk away from a cluster of memories and to buy is to choose where the future will take place.

Cinder Slaughterhouse-Five Becoming Mrs. Lewis Diary of a Wimpy Kid Buffalo Before Breakfast (Magic Tree House #18) Magnolia Table The Apothecary A Year in Provence Under the Tuscan Sun House of Spies The Paris Architect The Joy Luck Club Little Dorrit A Man Called Ove Nine Women, One Dress Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking

To bury the grape tendril in such a way that it shoots out new growth I recognize easily as a metaphor for the way life must change from time to time if we are to go forward in our thinking.

And, I think, for those of us who came of age with the women's movement, there's always the fear that it's not real, you're not really allowed to determine your own life. It may be pulled back at any moment.

That night, I wore a dress that Mary had picked out for my trip. I had told her that I wouldn't need anything that dressy, but she'd convinced me otherwise. "You don't know who you'll meet, since you'll be with Sally and American TV. It could be a count or a prince or Marcello from 'Under the Tuscan Sun.'" As soon as she'd mentioned Marcello, I'd put the dress in my "take it" pile. The pinkish-brown dress was a very thin, satiny silk weave that Mary said was "charmeuse" and I said was the next best thing to foie gras and white truffles. The neckline plunged into a deep V, revealing nothing but suggesting everything. The skirt ended midcalf and would have totally met Nonna's approval were it not for the slit to my thigh.

A green light is a green light, avanti, avanti,” the mayor explained. “A red light—just a suggestion.” And yellow? he was asked. “Yellow is for gaiety.

Most travellers here feel that driving in Rome qualifies as an experience that can be added to one’s vita, that everyday autostrada trips are examinations in courage and that the Amalfi coast drive is a definition of hell. “These people really know how to drive,” I remember him saying as he swung our no-power rented Fiat into the passing lane, turn signal blinking. A Maserati zooming forward in the rearview mirror blasted us back to the right lane. Soon he was admiring daring maneuvers. “Did you see that? He had two wheels dangling in thin air!” he marveled. “Sure, they have their share of duffers riding the center lane but most people keep to the rules.” “What rules?” I asked as someone in a tiny car like ours whizzed by going a hundred. Apparently there are speed limits, according to the size of the engine, but I never have seen anyone stopped for speeding in all my summers in Italy. You’re dangerous if you’re going sixty. I’m not sure what the accident rate is; I rarely see one but I imagine many are caused by slow drivers (tourists perhaps?) who incite the cars behind them.

But, slow learner, I'm beginning to trust that the gods are not going to snatch my firstborn if I happen to enjoy my life.

Simply put, ferragosto, August 15, marks the ascension of the corporeal body and soul of the Virgin Mary into heaven. Why August 15? Perhaps it was too hot to remain on earth another day.

The Italians, who have been “guest workers” at many times and in many countries, are thrown by the phenomenon happening in their own country. During this second summer at Bramasole, the newspapers are tolerant to indignant about Albanians literally washing up on the shores of southern Italy. Living in San Francisco, a city where immigrants arrive daily, we cannot get excited about their problem. Americans in cities have realized that migrations are on the increase; that the whole demographic tapestry is being rewoven on a vast scale in the late twentieth century. Europe is having a harder time coming to grips with this fact. We have our own poor, they tell us incredulously. Yes, we say, we do, too. Italy is amazingly homogeneous; it is rare to see a black or Asian face in Tuscany. Recently, Eastern Europeans, finding the German work force at last full of people like themselves, began arriving in this prosperous part of northern Italy. Now we understood Alfiero’s estimate for the work. Instead of paying the normal Italian twenty-five thousand to thirty thousand lire per hour, he is able to pay nine thousand. He assures us they are legal workers and are covered by his insurance. The Poles are pleased with the hourly wage; at home, before the factory went kaput, they barely earned that much in a day.

I never thought about food like that, but it makes sense. You aren't a different person when you read versus when you eat or do anything else----everything in us does intersect, I guess..." Cecilia's voice drifted away as she thought, and a blush suffused her face. "Put it that way, I see why I eat terribly. I love American teenage food, and it fits with my soft spot for eighties teen movies. You know, Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink... I even dress like that when I feel sad. Austen's much more intellectual." "That's Jane. If it makes you feel better, I read only cookbooks, and they really shouldn't count as real books." I thought for a moment. "But I never forget a food reference." "Never?" I shrugged. "It's a gift." "Sixteen Candles?" "The cake, of course. Oh, but there's that quiche dinner too. See? Sixteen Candles and Dickens---all about breakfast." "Under the Tuscan Sun?" "Never read it, but I'm assuming a ton of Italian?" "That was obvious." Cecilia smiled. "What's your favorite food reference?" "I've got two. I think the best opening line in literature is Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence. 'The year began with lunch.' All books and all years should begin that way." "And the other?" "Coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscressandwichespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater-----" "That's too much!" She laughed. "That's exactly what Mole said. But Rat said, 'It's only what I always take on these little excursions, and the other animals are always telling me that I'm a mean beast and cut it VERY fine!'" I grinned. "I love that line." "What's that even from?" "The Wind in the Willows. It's the best picnic ever.

Though much had been changed, I felt the spirit of the book was intact, and even enhanced by her vision.

I simply fell in love [with Italy] - like you fall in love with a person

Mainly, I remember recognizing his idea that the house protects the dreamer; the houses that are important to us are the ones that allow us to dream in peace.

Never lose your childish innocence. It's the most important thing.