Allora Italian Quotes

I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits. ~ Evelyn Waugh

I listen to Morricone, the famed Italian film composer, while I'm working. ~ Daniel Handler

Certainly, for a newspaper director, to have within arm's reach a Travaglio, about whom every starring actor, supporting cast and extra of Italian political life he is ready upon cold request to provide an inquiry brief refined in the most minute details is a nice comfort. But also a bit unsettling. The day I asked him if in that archive, into which no one is allowed to stick their nose, there were a brief with my name on it, Marco changed the subject. ~ Indro Montanelli

A bad beginning makes a bad ending. - Italian proverb Saturday, ~ Jane Healey

We talked to Sergei Bodrov who did "Mongel" who I thought was incredible. There was a lot of people who've done a lot of things that I really appreciate and then you go back to the Italian spaghetti westerns that our spaghetti westerns were based off of so I've seen everything. ~ Josh Brolin

Medieval Italian life had recently become so fascinating for Vronsky that he even began wearing his hat and a wrap thrown over his shoulder in a medieval fashion, which was very becoming to him. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Instead of Otello being an Italian opera written in the style of Shakespeare, Othello is a play written by Shakespeare in the style of Italian opera. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Books that Uncle bought in Odessa or acquired in Heidelberg, books that he discovered in Lausanne or found in Berlin or Warsaw, books he ordered from America and books the like of which exist nowhere but in the Vatican Library, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, classical and modern Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, medieval Arabic, Russian, English, German, Spanish, Polish, French, Italian, and languages and dialects I had never even heard of, like Ugaritic and Slovene, Maltese and Old Church Slavonic. ~ Amos Oz

You are the trip I did not take, you are the pearls I could not buy,
you are my blue Italian lake, you are my piece of foreign sky.
You are my Honolulu moon, you are the book I did not write,
you are my heart's unuttered tune, you are a candle in my night.
You are the flower beneath the snow, in my dark sky a bit of blue,
answering disappointment's blow with I am happy! I have you! ~ Anne Campbell

IN EUROPE, I vomited into small buckets and brushed my teeth repeatedly with chalky British toothpaste. I lay prone on the bathroom floors of several museums, feeling the cold tile underneath my cheek as my brain liquefied and seeped out my ear, bubbling. Migraines left my blood spreading across unfamiliar hotel sheets, dripping on the floors, oozing into carpets, soaking through leftover croissants and Italian lace cookies. ~ E. Lockhart

Pizza was made for television in so many ways: it is easy to heat up, easy to divide and easy to eat in a group. It is easy to enjoy, easy to digest and easy-going. It is so Italian! ~ Yotam Ottolenghi

Not everyone in Italy may know how to cook, but nearly everyone knows how to eat. Eating in Italy is one more manifestation of the Italian's age-old gift of making art out of life. ~ Marcella Hazan

Very few of the early Italian humanists were really humane. ~ Irving Babbitt

To give a clear picture of the whole scene of Italian gastronomy. ~ Anna Del Conte

I lived right on the borderline of a black neighborhood. So I could go into the black area and then there'd be these ghetto theaters that you could actually see the new kung fu movie or the new blaxploitation movie or the new horror film or whatever. And then there was also, if you went just a little further away, there was actually a little art house cinema. So I could actually see, you know, French movies or Italian movies, when they came out. ~ Quentin Tarantino

Oh, my wife is a wonderful cook. She comes from a food-loving Italian family - her father owned a pizzeria! ~ Buddy Valastro

Maybe he does have a choice to make, but everything I feel, everything I know says absoloutely that choice will be you"
"She speaks French and Italian."
"That bitch. ~ J.D. Robb

In Italy, for the same price as a typical British hamburger meal including sweet, a builder's labourer could eat like a king - rather better in fact, because pasta dishes gain from being kept simple. ~ Clive James

She knows they mean no harm by it, but come on! No seven-year-old who has seen films about the Italian Mafia wants to be "sorted" by her family. ~ Fredrik Backman

And just when we were at the end of our design process there was the news that the Italian government and the U.S. government had signed an agreement to fly the first Italian astronaut on that flight. ~ Umberto Guidoni

As for free will, there is such a narrow crack of it for man to move in, crushed as he is from birth by environment, heredity, time and event and local convention. If I had been born of Italian parents in one of the caves in the hills I would be a prostitute at the age of 12 or so because I had to live (why?) and that was the only way open. If I was born into a wealthy New York family with pseudo-cultural leanings, I would have had my coming-out party along with the rest of them, and be equipped with fur coats, social contacts, and a blase pout. How do I know? I don't; I can only guess. I wouldn't be I. But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of "I" that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratches on the paper ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I. ~ Sylvia Plath

Finally, and even more seriously, I fear a return to the international climate that prevailed in the 1920s and 30s, when the United States withdrew from the global stage and countries everywhere pursued what they perceived to be their own interests without regard to larger and more enduring goals. When arguing that every age has its own Fascism, the Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi added that the critical point can be reached "not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralysing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned." If he is right (and I think he is), we have reason to be concerned by the gathering array of political and social currents buffeting us today - currents propelled by the dark underside of the technological revolution, the corroding effects of power, the American president's disrespect for truth and the widening acceptance of dehumanising insults, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism as being within the bounds of normal public debate. We are not there yet, but these feel like signposts on the road back to an era when Fascism found nourishment and individual tragedies were multiplied millions-fold. ~ Madeleine K. Albright

My goodness carina mia, you are so thin. You do not eat enough. Mangia, mangia, mangia! [Alicia's Italian mother's view of her daughter.] ~ Celia Conrad

You said,' Camille protested, 'that when you wanted to get on terms with Gabrielle you cultivated her mother. It's true, everybody saw you doing it, boasting in Italian and rolling your eyes and doing your tempestuous southerner impersonation. ~ Hilary Mantel

I never thought that tailoring was something that normal people did; I just thought that it was something that guys who had suits made of Italian silk depended on, and I wish someone had told me what a difference tailoring makes! ~ Anna Kendrick

All of a sudden (in 1938 I think), in order to extend its autarchy to the domain of cinema, Italy decreed an embargo on American films. It wasn't a question of censorship: as usual the censors granted or denied permission to individual films, and nobody saw the ones that didn't get it and that was it. In spite of the awkward anti-Hollywood propaganda campaign that accompanied the measure (right around that time the regime began to conform to Hitler's racism), the true reason for the embargo was supposed to be commercial protectionism, in order to make room in the market for Italian (and German) productions. For this reason the four largest American production and distribution companies - Metro, Fox, Paramount, Warner - (I'm still relying on memory, trusting the accuracy of the registration of my trauma), whereas films by other American companies like RKO, Columbia, Universal, United Artists (which had also been distributed before then by Italian companies) continued to arrive until 1941, that is until Italy found itself at war with the United States. I was still granted some sporadic satisfaction (in fact, one of the greatest: Stagecoach [John Ford, 1939]) but my collector's voracity suffered a fatal blow.

Compared to all of the prohibitions and obligations that fascism had imposed on us, and to the even more severe ones that it continued to enforce in those years before and then during the war, the veto on American films was certainly a minor or small loss, and I ~ Italo Calvino

Had there been no Renaissance and no Italian influence to bring in the stories of other lands English history would, it may be, have become as important to the English imagination as the Greek Myths to the Greek imagination; and many plays by many poets would have woven it into a single story whose contours, vast as those of Greek myth, would have made living men and women seem like swallows building their nests under the architrave of some Temple of the Giants. ~ William Butler Yeats

I learned to cook from my mom. Most of what I ate growing up was Italian cooking. ~ Steve Albini

Giovanni always had music running through his head. Moments he experienced in life recalled for him scenes from operas. [Giovanni Tempesta] ~ Vincent B. "Chip" LoCoco

What a waste that we lost Mussolini. He is a first-rate man who would have led our party to power in Italy. [Addressing to a delegation of Italian socialists in Moscow after Mussolini's March on Rome in 1922] ~ Vladimir Lenin

I think my favorite, and Coppola and that whole thing. East coast Italian directors I guess. ~ Anthony Michael Hall

I went to schools that were small enough that basically everyone was in a play. I played a bouncing ball in a production of Alice in Wonderland and a fat man in an Italian commedia dell'arte play. I was given some small chances. ~ Lena Dunham

I like my country, but I don't think like an Italian. It's a complex, complicated difficult country to make things happen in. ~ Lapo Elkann

I learned when I was a student in Connecticut. I had an Italian-American teacher who gave me classes for a week, and then said, "Okay, you're ready." And I wasn't ready. I didn't know how to drive!. But he knew the policeman who gave the test. And that's how I got through. ~ Sandra Cisneros

I'm giving pleasure to you. Don't interfere. ~ Olga Goa

The Italian mafia, they're very [into] construction. They're in a whole different way of operating than they did back in the '20s. ~ Robert Loggia

One cannot analyse the character of European gardens without looking beyond the Mediterranean. This is because horticulture, palace life and city-building developed in the Fertile Crescent before spreading, via Crete, Greece, Egypt and Italy to the forests of Europe ~ Tom Turner

If you don't drink coffee, I am suspicious of your character and will not invite you to my Italian lake home. ~ George Clooney

At a certain level, credible deterrence depends on a credible enemy. The Soviet Union disintegrated, but the surviving superpower's instinct to de-escalate intensified: In Kirkuk as in Kandahar, every Lilliputian warlord quickly grasped that you could provoke the infidel Gulliver with relative impunity. Mutually assured destruction had curdled into Massively Applied Desultoriness.

Clearly, if one nation is responsible for near half the world's military budget, a lot of others aren't pulling their weight. The Pentagon outspends the Chinese, British, French, Russian, Japanese, German, Saudi, Indian, Italian, South Korean, Brazilian, Canadian, Australian, Spanish, Turkish, and Israeli militaries combined. So why doesn't it feel like that?

Well, for exactly that reason: If you outspend every serious rival combined, you're obviously something other than the soldiery of a conventional nation state. But what exactly? The geopolitical sugar daddy is so busy picking up the tab for the global order he's lost all sense of national interest. ~ Mark Steyn

I'm away so much I've had to learn to cook, and I find it relaxing after filming. I make stews and liver and bacon, and an Italian mate taught me how to make a mean puttanesca sauce. ~ Ray Winstone

I don't know," she said. "I'm not sure you would like me in real life. I'm a lot different there, you know. I don't even look the same."
" I don't care if you look like a troll with warts," Sir Leo declared, taking her hand in his. "I love you. ~ Mari Mancusi

I am very much a person who appreciates perennial things. Things like a Lacoste shirt, a Clarks desert boot, Persol sunglasses and Vans shoes that have been the same forever. There are certain things that once you find it, you like it and it's done. I like Italian clothing, like suits from Battistoni and I have a shirt by Piero Albertelli. ~ Roman Coppola

I can read more languages than I speak! I speak French and Italian - not very well, alas, but I can get by. I read German and Spanish. I can read Latin (I did a lot of Latin at school.) I'm afraid I do not speak any African languages, although I can understand a little bit of the Zulu-related languages, but only a tiny bit. ~ Alexander McCall Smith