Marlena De Blasi Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

They all know the truth, that there are only three subjects worth talking about. At least here in these parts," he says, "The weather, which, as they're farmers, affects everything else. Dying and birthing, of both people and animals. And what we eat - this last item comprising what we ate the day before and what we're planning to eat tomorrow. And all three of these major subjects encompass, in one way or another, philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, the physical sciences, history, art, literature, and religion. We get around to sparring about all that counts in life but we usually do it while we're talking about food, it being a subject inseparable from every other subject. It's the table and the bed that count in life. And everything else we do, we do so we can get back to the table, back to the bed.

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.

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

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.

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.

Some people ripen, some rot.

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

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?"

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?

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.

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.

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

We're all who we are endlessly.

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.