Quotes from Marlena De Blasi

Nothing squandered, nothing cloaked.

I preferred one waltz with a beauty to a lifetime with someone less rare.

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.

I wonder if a few drops of a melting soul aren't what make a really fine loaf of bread.

You're the type who will perish from exuberance.

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.

sotto le cenere, beans in a flask braised under ash. Now he's pouring the cooled, herb-scented beans from all the flasks into a huge white bowl, drizzling on more oil and tossing them. When everyone is seated he and his wife will carry the bowl together, passing the creamy-fleshed beans table to table, person to person, just like his grandparents used to do.

Cominciamo dal fondo. Let's begin at the beginning. St. Augustine said it most clearly, We are, every one of us, going to die. Rotting is the way of all things. A tree, a cheese, a heart, a whole human chassis. Now, knowing that, understanding that, living begins to seem less important than living the way you'd like to live. Do you agree with that?

Live gracefully in plenty and live gracefully in need. Embrace them both or swindle yourself out of half a life.

How I wish I could give away pieces of this day like loaves of warm bread. The

Those like Brasini and those who are not like Brasini. Those who would take your face in their hands and kiss you like in the films and those who would never in ten million years take your face in their hands and kiss you like in the films. ...You are definitely a Brasini, sir. ...the Brasini theory,....

The old man's eyes are unpolished sapphires, and, in the haze of a thousand years of incense burned, he tells me tales of Canaletto, of Guardi and Titian and Tiepolo. He speaks of them as though they are his confidants, the fellows with whom he sups on Thursday nights. He says life is a search for beauty and that art dissolves loneliness. His and mine, I think. I am not alone. I am a wanderer in a blue felt cloche, come to Venice to stitch together her fantasies.

Barlozzo's word for nonchalance is sprezzatura. A hard word, a hard concept. The translation is "the state of effortlessness." It means the mastering of something—an art, a life—without really working at it, with the result being nonchalance.

Gauntlets are the stuff of every life, but when you learn, young, how to pick them up, how to work them against the demons, and, finally, how to outlast if not escape those same demons, life can seem more merciful. It's that long, smooth, false swanning through the course of a life that seems to drive a person, sooner or later, into the wall. I never swanned through anything, but I was always grateful for the chance to keep trying to shine up things. Anyway

his "ma guarda che roba, but will you look at this," when he sees the flowers and then his tinkering search for the espresso pot while I'm pulling on shorts and sandals, shouting down, "Why don't we just run up the hill for cappuccini?