Marlena De Blasi Quotes

#1. Our babies cried when we left them and we cry when they leave us. Echoes. Proud almost to arrogance then, we pushed them about in their carriages. Dutifully, wearily now they push us about in our chairs.

Marlena De Blasi

#2. Even in these first days together, it is very clear that this feeling of mine for the stranger has trumped all the other adventures in my life. It has shuffled everything and everyone else I thought I was moving toward or away from.

Marlena De Blasi

#3. Some people are born empty. All manner of good deeds and patience and loving kindness can't even begin to fill them up.

Marlena De Blasi

#4. I don't pretend to understand these feelings, but I'm willing to let the inexplicable sit sacred.

Marlena De Blasi

#5. We're all who we are endlessly.

Marlena De Blasi

#6. How strange it is, sometimes, which conversations or events stays with us while so much else melts as fast as April snow.

Marlena De Blasi

#7. You know I've always wanted someone to sing to me, but now I know that what I want more is to sing to you.

Marlena De Blasi

#8. Rather than being love-blinded, it is in love that I can see, really see.

Marlena De Blasi

#9. Life is this conto, account," said the banker in him. "It's an unknown quantity of days from which one is permitted to withdraw only one precious one of them at a time. No deposits accepted.

Marlena De Blasi

#10. Sicily could only be an island, less by the caprice of nature than by her own insolence. As though she might have quit Italy had she not already been born separate from it.

Marlena De Blasi

#11. Everything about this evening is both exquisite and bewildering and I can't decide if I want to go on with this dream or run back down the yellow-lit rock to the stable. But the stable door is closed.

Marlena De Blasi

#12. Some people ripen, some rot.

Marlena De Blasi

#13. Maybe the only thing that matters is to make our lives last as long as we do. You know, to make a life last until it ends, to make all the parts come out even, like when you rub the last piece of bread in the last drop of oil on your plate and eat it with the last sip of wine in your glass.

Marlena De Blasi

#14. We accumulate pain, collect it ... We display it, stack it up into a pile, then we stack it up into a mountain, so we can climb up onto it, waiting for or demanding sympathy: "Hey, do you see how big my pain is?"

Marlena De Blasi

#15. Take my hand and grow young with me. Don't rush. Don't sleep. Be a beginner. Light the candles. Keep the fire. Dare to love someone. Tell yourself the truth. Stay inside the rapture.

Marlena De Blasi

#16. Most crimes are connected to hunger. One hunger or another.

Marlena De Blasi

#17. We violate the innocence of things in the name of rationality so we can wander about, uninterrupted, in our search for passion and sentiment.

Marlena De Blasi

#18. You will sustain your rage, using time as a defense against fear and indolence. In the great stash of defenses, time is the one least imaginative.

Marlena De Blasi

#19. Some say it rings by its own will, that if one arrives in Venice to its great, noble clanging, it is proof of one's Venetian soul, proof the old bell remembers one from some other time.

Marlena De Blasi

#20. We believed the fairy tales we told our children and we loved them beyond reason even when we were green and bungling about it. We were children loving our children. And that's who we are still.

Marlena De Blasi

#21. You rob time, Fernando. How arrogant you are, taking an evening like this one as though it were some sour cherry, spitting half its flesh into the dirt. Every time you pitch yourself back into the past, you lose time. Have you so much of it to spare, my love?

Marlena De Blasi

#22. There isn't an agony in the world more powerful than tenderness

Marlena De Blasi