Carrucci Venetian Quotes

Occasionally, events in one's life become clearer through the prism of experience, a phrase which simply means that things tend to be clearer as time goes on. For instance, when a person is just born, they usually have no idea what curtains are and spend a great deal of their first months wondering why on earth Mommy and Daddy have hung large pieces of cloth over each window in the nursery. But as the person grows older, the idea of curtains becomes clearer through the prism of experience. The person will learn the word "curtains" and notice that they are actually quite handy for keeping a room dark when it is time to sleep, and for decorating an otherwise boring window area. Eventually, they will entirely accept the idea of curtains of their own, or venetian blinds, and it is all due to the prism of experience. ~ Lemony Snicket

Burnout comes easy in the high-pressure world of television, and when the opportunity arose to move to Las Vegas and bring my friends and star chefs to open their restaurants at the Venetian, I made the move here. ~ Robin Leach

One grim Weltanschauung for this new era was well expressed by the Venetian nationalist demagogue in Michael Dibdin's novel, Dead Lagoon: There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are. These are the old truths we are painfully rediscovering after a century and more of sentimental cant. Those who deny them deny their family, their heritage, their culture, their birthright, their very selves! They will not lightly be forgiven. ~ Samuel P. Huntington

I roll onto my side and stare out the venetian blinds at the blue sky beyond. After a few minutes I'm lulled into a sort of peace. The sky, the sky
same as it always was. ~ Sara Gruen

I first heard music while in the womb. My mom tells me she played Tubular Bells with the headphones against her stomach all the time. A bit disturbing as I believe that is the theme to The Exorcist. Maybe she thought she was having Satan's baby. ~ Venetian Snares

... he closed the venetian blinds and then the drapes, and he lay down on the outside of the coverlet. But sleep would not come. Tears came instead. They seeped. Billy turned on the Magic Fingers, and he was jiggled as he wept. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Light is important to us humans. It influences our moods, our perceptions, our energy levels. A face glimpsed among trees, dappled by the shadows and the green-tinged light reflected from the forest, will seem quite different to the same face seen on a beach in hard, dry, sunlight, or in a darkening room at twilight, with the shadows of a venetian blind striped across it like a convict's uniform. ~ John Marsden

He rushed past the usual fragments of painful memories – his mother smiling down at him, her face illuminated by the sunlight rippling off the Venetian Grand Canal; his sister Bianca laughing as she pulled him across the Mall in Washington, D.C., her green floppy hat shading her eyes and the splash of freckles across her nose. He saw Percy Jackson on a snowy cliff outside Westover Hall, shielding Nico and Bianca from the manticore as Nico clutched a Mythomagic figurine and whispered, I'm scared. He saw Minos, his old ghostly mentor, leading him through the Labyrinth. Minos's smile was cold and cruel. Don't worry, son of Hades. You will have your revenge. ~ Rick Riordan

A painting walks into the room supported by the collector. It is the painting of a nude by a contemporary artist. She is scarred by shadows from venetian blinds. "The ritual scarification of light and shadow," I say. But am thinking, silently, the female nude is the self-ironization of the male. She, in his shadow, by design. ~ Carla Harryman

[On writing to Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple:] I told her I would play a Venetian blind, dirt on the floor, anything. ~ Whoopi Goldberg

California during the 1940s had Hollywood and the bright lights of Los Angeles, but on the other coast was Florida, land of sunshine and glamour, Miami and Miami Beach. If you weren't already near California's Pacific Coast you headed for Florida during the winter. One of the things which made Miami such a mix of glitter and sunshine was the plethora of movie stars who flocked there to play, rubbing shoulders with tycoons and gangsters. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between the latter two.

Miami and everything that surrounded it hadn't happened by accident. Carl Fisher had set out to make Miami Beach a playground destination during the 1930s and had succeeded far beyond his dreams. The promenade behind the Roney Plaza Hotel was a block-long lovers' lane of palm trees and promise that began rather than ended in the blue waters of the Atlantic.

Florida was more than simply Miami and Miami Beach, however. When George Merrick opened the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables papers across the country couldn't wait to gush about the growing aura of Florida. They tore down Collins Bridge in the Gables and replaced it with the beautiful Venetian Causeway. You could plop down a fiver if you had one and take your best girl - or the girl you wanted to score with - for a gondola ride there before the depression, or so I'd been told.

You see, I'd never actually been to Florida before the war, much less Miami. I was a newspaper reporter from Chi ~ Bobby Underwood

Anyone who has ever tried to write a novel knows what an arduous task it is, undoubtedly one of the worst ways of occupying oneself. You have to remain within yourself all the time, in solitary confinement. It's a controlled psychosis, an obsessive paranoia manacled to work completely lacking in the feather pens and bustles and Venetian masks we would ordinarily associate with it, clothed instead in a butcher's apron and rubber boots, eviscerating knife in hand. You can only barely see from that writerly cellar the feet of passers-by, hear the rapping of their heels. Every so often someone stops and bends down and glances in through the window, and then you get a glimpse of a human face, maybe even exchange a few words. But ultimately the mind is so occupied with its own act, a play staged by the self ofr the self in a hasty, makeshift cabinet of curiosities peopled by author and character, narrator and reader, the person describing and the person described, that feet, shoes, heels, and faces become, sooner or later, mere components of that act. ~ Olga Tokarczuk

When she looked down the hall at Anne and at me it was as if she looked straight through us, as if we were nothing but clear panes of Venetian glass and all she wanted to know was what might be beyond. She did not seem to envy us, nor see us as rivals to her father's attention or even as a danger to her mother's place. She saw us as a pair of light women, so insubstantial that the wind might blow us away in a merciful puff. She ~ Philippa Gregory

I feel moderately bad about this whole thing. On the one hand, I am providing myself with urgently required survival skills. Other lessons in this series include Shoplifting, Beating People Up, Picking Locks, Climbing Trees, Driving, Housebreaking, Dumpster Diving, and How to Use Oddball Things like Venetian Blinds and Garbage Can Lids as Weapons. On the other hand, I'm corrupting my poor innocent little self. I sigh. Somebody's got to do it. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

[Luchino] Visconti came from the Milanese branch of one of Europe's oldest families, whose roots can be traced back to the early 13th century. He might have appeared as a character in one of his own films about the aristocracy, such as Senso or The Leopard – that's the life he was born into. But at a certain point in the 1930s, his passion for theatre, opera and the cinema set him on a radically different path.

(...)

He has often been referred to as a great political artist, but that's too limiting and frozen a description. His sense of European history was vast and he knew the lives of the rich and powerful first hand – but at a certain point he became drawn to understand the other side of life, that of the poor and powerless. He had a strong sense of the particular manner in which absolutely everyone, from the Sicilian fishermen in his neorealist classic La Terra Trema to the Venetian aristocrats in Senso, was affected by the grand movements of history. ~ Martin Scorsese

Democracy is something America has never really practiced. Because the Founding Fathers hated two things: monarchy and democracy. They wanted a republic, a replica of the Roman or Venetian republics. They didn't even like the etymology of the word "democracy." ~ Gore Vidal

What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and power into one body, no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or France, or of the aristocrats of a Venetian senate. ~ Thomas Jefferson

When I'm given a role, the first thing I do is read the play over and over again. I scour the script and write down everything the character says about himself and everything that everyone else says about him. I immerse myself in my character and imagine what it might be like to be that person.
When I played Cassio in Othello I imagined what it would be like to be a lieutenant in the Venetian navy in 1604. I sat down with Ewan McGregor and Chiwetel Ejiofor and together we decided that Othello, Iago and Cassio had soldiery in their bones.
I took from the script that Cassio was talented and ambitious, with no emotional or physical guard - and that's how I played the part.
For me, acting is about recreating the circumstances that would make me feel how my character is feeling. In the dressing room, I practise recreating those circumstances in my head and I try to not get in the way of myself. For example, in act two of Othello, when Cassio is manipulated to fight Roderigo and loses his rank, some nights I would burst into tears; other nights I wouldn't but I would still feel the same emotion, night after night. Just as in life, the way we respond to catastrophe or death will be different every time because the process is unconscious.
By comparison, in Chekhov's Ivanov I played the young doctor, Lvov. Lvov was described as "a prig and a bigot … uprightness in boots … tiresome … completely sincere". His emotions were locked away. I worked around the key phrase: ~ Tom Hiddleston

My last moments on earth would be spent in a Golden Nugget bathtub with crushed beer cans scattered across my faux Venetian tile and acrylic bearskin rug. ~ Lindsay Mark Lewis

I was in a couple punk bands as a kid. I did some more experimental stuff with my friend Dan for a few years. ~ Venetian Snares

My favourite setting is Italy, specifically Venice, because it is there that I met my husband, who is Venetian. I used it as the setting for Virtue and Vice, Enchantment in Venice, and Seduced by Innocence. Apart from Venice, my favourite city is Rome. ~ Lucy Gordon

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. ~ Marlena De Blasi

One can't help thinking, Daddy, what a colourless life a man is forced to lead, when one reflects that chiffon and Venetian point and hand embroidery and Irish crochet are to him mere empty words. Whereas a woman- whether she is interested in babies or microbes or husbands or poetry or servants or parallelograms or gardens or Plato or bridge- is fundamentally and always interested in clothes. ~ Jean Webster

He had a face right out of film noir, a face meant to be shot in black and white, parallel shadows of venetian blinds slashing across it, a plume of cigarette smoke spiraling beside it. ~ Khaled Hosseini

The Venetian seemed to have a thing for gems and trinkets. Simon wondered if these items had been taken from victims.
Aldric caught some of the gems as they fell, and pocketed them.
You're just going to take those?" asked Simon, incredulous.
How do you think i got you into that school of yours?" answered Aldric, catching another windfall. "Spoils of war. ~ Jason Hightman

For the first time in her life, Alba wanted to be beautiful. She regretted that the splendid women in her family had not bequeathed their attributes to her, that the only one who had, Rosa the Beautiful, had given her only the algae tones in her hair, which seemed more like a hairdresser's mistake then anything else. Miguel understood the source of her anxiety. He led her by the hand to the huge Venetian mirror that adorned one wall of their secret room, shook the dust from the cracked glass, and lit all the candles they had and arranged them around her. She stared at herself in the thousand pieces of the mirror. In the candlelight her skin was the unreal color of wax statues. Miguel began to caress her and she saw her face transformed in the kaleidoscope of the mirror, and she finally believed that she was the most beautiful woman in the universe because she was able to see herself with Miguel's eyes. ~ Isabel Allende

It takes a great deal to make a successful American, but to make a happy Venetian takes only a handful of quick sensibility. The ~ Henry James

Listen to the silence,' said Margarita to the master, the sand rustling under her bare feet. 'Listen to the silence and enjoy it. Here is the peace that you never knew in your lifetime. Look, there is your home for eternity, which is your reward. I can already see a Venetian window and a climbing vine which grows right up to the roof. It's your home, your home for ever. In the evenings people will come to see you- people who interest you, people who will never upset you. They will play to you and sing to you and you will see how beautiful the room is by candlelight. You shall go to sleep with your dirty old cap on, you shall go to sleep with a smile on your lips. ~ Mikhail Bulgakov

Other men used their effete faiths and mean faculties with a high moral purpose. The Venetian gave the most earnest faith, and the lordliest faculty, to gild the shadows of an antechamber, or heighten the splendours of a holiday. ~ John Ruskin

Judas paused at the edge of the Venetian ballroom, letting the colors swirl in front of him. Crimson reds, deepest golds, indigos that matched the evening sea, blacks that ate the light, and the pearly radiance of bare shoulders. Nowhere did the women dress as brightly, and display ~ James Rollins

Apparently the painting was removed from a Venetian palazzo, shipped to Newport and glued above the bed so Alva could feel inspired every morning as she awoke. ~ Belinda Jones

It was then that I made the discovery that his talk created reverberations, that the echo took a long time to reach one's ears. I began to compare it with French talk in which I had been enveloped for so long. The latter seemed more like the play of light on an alabaster vase, something reflective, nimble, dancing, liquid, evanescent, whereas the other, the Katsimbalistic language, was opaque, cloudy, pregnant with resonances which could only be understood long afterwards, when the reverberations announced the collision with thoughts, people, objects located in distant parts of the earth. The Frenchman puts walls about his talk, as he does about his garden: he puts limits about everything in order to feel at home. At bottom he lacks confidence in his fellow-man; he is skeptical because he doesn't believe in the innate goodness of human beings. He has become a realist because it is safe and practical. The Greek, on the other hand, is an adventurer: he is reckless and adaptable, he makes friends easily. The walls which you see in Greece, when they are not of Turkish or Venetian origin, go back to the Cyclopean age. Of my own experience I would say that there is no more direct, approachable, easy man to deal with than the Greek. He becomes a friend immediately: he goes out to you. With the Frenchman friendship is a long and laborious process: it may take a lifetime to make a friend of him. He is best in acquaintanceship where there is little to risk and where there are no afterm ~ Henry Miller

Lord Sheffield tucked a stray tendril behind her ear and cupped her cheek in one hand. "Do you see a kissing ball anywhere?" "N-no." She darted a quick glance about the room. It was decorated as a Venetian masquerade, not as a Christmastide celebration. There was no holly to be found. "Why do you ask?" "Because I don't want you to think I have any reason for doing this other than because I wish to. ~ Erica Ridley

Don't talk to me about writing; you couldn't write "fuck" on a dusty Venetian blind. ~ Coral Browne

My mother-in-law has so many wrinkles, when she smiles she looks like a Venetian blind. ~ Les Dawson

Then the sunlight burst into the room through the venetian blinds; I breathed hard, filling my lungs with air. I could see my feet, my arms; there I was. I tried hard to get back in my body again ... it was such a long way to my feet. ~ Sylvia Plath

Celadon, azure, crimson and amber.
They are beautiful, for sure.
But they have nothing on you.

Even the piano and its shades of melodic sounds.
And even, when I have the chance, Chopin in the park in Paris.
These are some of my fondest memories.

But still it is hard to think of the subtle nuances in the gold of the sun when I see you.
In you there is no viridian, cerulean, venetian, or citrine.

This is not to say that there is no color in you, because there is.
I just have not found the right words to describe you, and somehow,
I feel that I never will. ~ Queenbe Monyei

His clothing marked him as Italian. The cadence of his speech announced that he was Venetian. His eyes were all policeman. ~ Donna Leon

The lintel of more than one collapsed Venetian house on Crete bears the Latin motto 'The world is nothing but smoke and shadows'. ~ Roger Crpwley