Alessandro Baricco Quotes

#1. He was one of those men who like to be observers at their own lives ... such people observe their destiny much as most people tend to observe a rainy day.

Alessandro Baricco

#2. Every so often I wonder what on earth we are waiting for. Silence. For it to be too late, Madame.

Alessandro Baricco

#3. beyond the end of the world

Alessandro Baricco

#4. The last light, in the last window, went out. Only the unstoppable machine of the sea still tears away at the silence with the cyclical explosion of nocturnal waves, distant memories of sleepwalking storms and the shipwrecks of dream.

Alessandro Baricco

#5. This is the seashore. Neither land nor sea. It's a place that does not exist.

Alessandro Baricco

#6. Perhaps sometimes life shows you a side of itself which leaves you with nothing more to say

Alessandro Baricco

#7. You're never really done for, as long as you've got a good story and someone to tell it to.

Alessandro Baricco

#8. Only the rustle of those colours waving in the air, impenetrable, lighter than nothingness

Alessandro Baricco

#9. As you see, it is not that I don't know my own mind, I know it very well but only up to a certain point in the matter. I know perfectly well what the question is. It's the answer I want.

Alessandro Baricco

#10. I did not love you out or boredom or loneliness or caprice. I loved you because the desire for you was stronger than any happiness.

Alessandro Baricco

#11. When loneliness mastered him he would go up to the cemetery ... The rest of his time was taken up with a liturgy of habits that succeeded in warding off sadness.

Alessandro Baricco

#12. In the world I inhabit, there is a shortage of intellectual honesty, but not of intelligence.

Alessandro Baricco

#13. Read the flight of your arrow if you want to know your future.

Alessandro Baricco

#14. She had not really a sensitive soul, but to put it in exact terms, was possessed by an uncontrollable feeling of mind

Alessandro Baricco

#15. There's a sense of incomprehensible apocalypse in the air - we all feel it - and there's a rumor going around: the barbarians are coming.

Alessandro Baricco

#16. You can't sow without plowing first. First you have to break up the earth.

Alessandro Baricco

#17. Seeing in the air things that the others did not see.

Alessandro Baricco

#18. Sooner or later you'll have to tell the truth to someone.

Alessandro Baricco

#19. He wasn't much cut out for serious conversations. And a goodbye is a serious conversation.

Alessandro Baricco

#20. His life fell like rain before his eyes, a quiet spectacle

Alessandro Baricco

#21. It's a strange grief ... to die of nostalgia for something you you will never live.

Alessandro Baricco

#22. It was surprising to consider that in fact there were signs, that is the embers of a voice destroyed by fire.

Alessandro Baricco

#23. There are people who die and, with all due respect, you don't lose anything. But he was one of those that when they're gone you feel it. As if the whole world had become, from one day to the next, a little heavier.

Alessandro Baricco

#24. Do you have children? she asked.
No.
Why?
The man answered that one had to have faith in the world to have children.

Alessandro Baricco

#25. Until the last glimmer of daylight.

Alessandro Baricco

#26. To die of yearning for something you will never experience

Alessandro Baricco

#27. Because despair was an excess that did not belong to him, he submitted to what was left of his life, and began again to look after it, with the unyielding tenacity of a gardener at work the morning after the storm.

Alessandro Baricco

#28. In front of him, nothing. He had a sudden glimpse of what he had considered invisible. The end of the world.

Alessandro Baricco

#29. As eight years before, he was leaving ... to rewrite his destiny in orderly fashion.

Alessandro Baricco

#30. There is nothing that can, in the dark become true

Alessandro Baricco

#31. It will not have escaped you that this town simulates normality that is completely illusory: every day something happens that one might euphemistically call irritating.

Alessandro Baricco

#32. Writing to someone is the only way to wait for him without hurting oneself.

Alessandro Baricco

#33. We are full of words whose true meaning we haven't been taught, and one of those words is suffering. Another is the word death. We don't know what they mean, but we use them, and this is a mystery.

Alessandro Baricco

#34. Reasons get forgotten.

Alessandro Baricco

#35. He fell to the ground like an olive tree, young, beautiful, strong, covered with white blossoms, suddenly shattered by a bolt of lightning in a storm.

Alessandro Baricco

#36. You were dead.'
She said.
'And in the whole world there was nothing beautiful left.

Alessandro Baricco

#37. I once knew a man who built a railway all for himself.

Alessandro Baricco

#38. And a while later:
'It is a strange sort of pain.'
Softly.
'To die of yearning for something you'll never experience.

Alessandro Baricco

#39. I often thought about him during the war; if only 1900 were here, who knows what he'd do, what he'd say. 'Fuck war' he'd say. But somehow, coming from me, it wasn't the same.

Alessandro Baricco

#40. And carefully he brought Time to a halt, for as long as he wished.

Alessandro Baricco

#41. In this transparency, the footprints of the little birds spoke with a muffled voice. What they spoke of was entirely without significance, or else something capable of lifting a life off its hinges: there was no way of knowing.

Alessandro Baricco

#42. Definitive resolutions are made always and only in a state of mind that is not destined to last.

Alessandro Baricco