Quotes from Marlena De Blasi

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.

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

Much of my crying is for joy and wonder rather than for pain. A trumpet's wailing, a wind's warm breath, the chink of a bell on an errant lamb, the smoke from a candle just spent, first light, twilight, firelight. Everyday beauty. I cry for how life intoxicates. And maybe just a little for how swiftly it runs.

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.

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

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

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

Some people ripen, some rot.

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

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

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.

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.

It was Don Paolo's birthday and all the people of the village were gathered in the piazza to celebrate him. The band played, the wine flowed, the children danced, and, as he stood for a moment alone under the pergola, a little girl approached the the beloved priest. But Don Paolo, are you not happy? she asked him. Of course I am happy, he assured the little girl. Why, then, aren't you crying?

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.

We're all who we are endlessly.

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.

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?

All of Venice is tattered, resewn, achingly lovely, and like an enchantress, she disarms me, making off with the very breath of me.

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

I don't write stories for you, signora. Not for Italians. For the others. I write them for the outsiders. The ones like me. The ones who long to wander over the old stones, watch the light. Those who, even for a while, want to be in the Italy they dream of.

It's mostly readers of my books who come to be with us. The tours become an extension of the books. Guests want to see the places I write about. They want to be where we are. I guess they want also to feel what I feel. They want to step through a magic door.

People who work alone know the beauty of solitude. The perhaps greater beauty of loneliness

Anyway nonna, grandmother, and everyone else has more sympathy for a whiff of failure than for the smell of new money.

Festina lente. Make haste slowly.