Top 27 Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa Quotes
#1. Now that the spectres of violence and spoliation had fled, the few hundred people who made up "the world" never tired of meeting each other, always the same ones, to exchange congratulations on still existing.
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
#2. 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;
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
#3. 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.
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
#4. 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.
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
#5. 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.
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
#6. 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?
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
#7. They are coming to teach us good manners!" I replied in English. "But they won't succeed, because we are gods.
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
#8. 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.
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
#9. 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?
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
#10. 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.
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
#11. Lovers want to be alone, or at least with strangers; never with older people, or worst of all with relatives.
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
#13. ...at every twirl a year fell from his shoulders; soon he felt back at the age of twenty, when in that very same ballroom he had danced with Stella before he knew disappointment, boredom, and the rest. For a second, that night, death seemed to him once more "something that happens to others."...
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
#14. 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.
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
#15. Tancredi, in an attempt to link gallantry with greed, tried to imagine himself tasting, in the aromatic forkfuls, the kisses of his neighbour Angelica, but he realised at once that the experiment was disgusting and suspended it, with a mental reserve about reviving this fantasy with the pudding
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
#16. In her wake came Don Calogero, a rat escorting a rose: though his clothes had no elegance this time they were at least decent.
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
#17. There is no need to tell you that the 'Prince of Salina' is the Prince Lampedusa, my great-grandfather Giulio Fabrizio.
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
#18. We spoke of those magic summer nights, looking out over the gulf of Castellammare, when the stars are mirrored in the sleeping sea, and how, lying on your back among the mastic trees, your spirit is lost in the whirling heavens, while the body braces itself, fearing the approach of demons.
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
#19. Your sort, always combining flavors! Sea urchins have to taste also like lemon, sugar also like chocolate, love also like paradise!
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
#23. In context this is funny:
"Tancredi, we passed a beam of wood lying in front of Ginestra's house.Go and fetch it, it'll get you in all the quicker" (Concetta)
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
#24. 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.
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
#26. 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.
Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
