Natalia Ginzburg Quotes

#1. My tidiness, and my untidiness, are full of regret and remorse and complex feelings.

Natalia Ginzburg

#2. Human relationships have to be rediscovered every day. We have to remember constantly that every kind of meeting with our neighbor is a human action and so it is always evil or good, true or deceitful, a kindness or a sin.

Natalia Ginzburg

#3. But that was the best time of my life, and only now that it has gone from me forever
only now do I realize it.

Natalia Ginzburg

#4. Over my real sorrows I never weep.

Natalia Ginzburg

#5. When I write stories I am like someone who is in her own country, walking along streets that she has known since she was a child, between walls and trees that are hers.

Natalia Ginzburg

#6. You aren't ill: it is just that you are made of second-rate materials.

Natalia Ginzburg

#7. We become adolescents when the words that adults exchange with one another become intelligible to us.

Natalia Ginzburg

#8. Being moderate with oneself and generous with others; this is what is meant by having a just relationship with money, by being free as far as money is concerned.

Natalia Ginzburg

#9. Italy is a country which is willing to submit itself to the worst governments. It is, as we know, a country ruled by disorder, cynicism, incompetence and confusion. Nevertheless we are aware of intelligence circulating in the streets like a vivid bloodstream.

Natalia Ginzburg

#10. And we are a people without tears. The things that moved our parents do not move us at all.

Natalia Ginzburg

#11. The true defense against wealth is not a fear of wealth - of its fragility and of the vicious consequences that it can bring - the true defense against wealth is an indifference to money.

Natalia Ginzburg

#12. England is a country where people stay exactly as they are. The soul does not receive the slightest jolt.

Natalia Ginzburg

#13. No adultery is bloodless.

Natalia Ginzburg

#14. But the English do not know what surprise is. No one ever turns his head to look at anyone else in the street.

Natalia Ginzburg

#15. I think of a writer as a river: you reflect what passes before you.

Natalia Ginzburg

#16. It seemed to us that his sadness was that of a boy, the voluptuous heedless melancholy of a boy who has still not come down to earth, and moves in the arid, solitary world of dreams.

Natalia Ginzburg

#17. As soon as we see our dreams betrayed we realize that the intensest joys of our life have nothing to do with reality, and we are consumed with regret for the time when they glowed within us. And in this succession of hopes and regrets our life slips by.

Natalia Ginzburg

#18. I begin to suspect that England is the most melancholy country in the world.

Natalia Ginzburg

#19. Today, as never before, the fates of men are so intimately linked to one another that a disaster for one is a disaster for everybody.

Natalia Ginzburg

#20. Someone who has seen a house collapse knows only too clearly what frail things little vases of flowers and pictures and white walls are. He knows only too well what a house is made of.

Natalia Ginzburg

#21. Every day silence harvests its victims. Silence is a mortal illness.

Natalia Ginzburg

#22. What we must remember above all in the education of our children is that their love of life should never weaken.

Natalia Ginzburg