Gondola Quotes

Young women looking after a children's summer camp, the ice-cream vendor's horn (his cart is a gondola on wheels, pushed by two handles), the displays of fruit, red melons with black pips, translucent, sticky grapes
all are props for the person who can no longer be alone. [1] But the cicadas' tender and bitter chirping, the perfume of water and stars one meets on September nights, the scented paths among the lentisks and the rosebushes, all these are signs of love for the person forced to be alone. [2]
[1] That is to say, everybody.
[2] That is to say, everybody. ~ Albert Camus

As to Don Juan, confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? and under it? ~ Lord Byron

Though he was scared even to look up, much less down, he raised his hands and caught the side of the gondola. With a stream of curse words known principally to the fourth class of the Accademia San Pietro in Rome, he pulled himself back. ~ Mark Helprin

In Memory of My Feelings"

My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent
and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.
He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals.

My quietness has a number of naked selves,
so many pistols I have borrowed to protect myselves
from creatures who too readily recognize my weapons
and have murder in their heart!
though in winter
they are warm as roses, in the desert
taste of chilled anisette.
At times, withdrawn,
I rise into the cool skies
and gaze on at the imponderable world with the simple identification
of my colleagues, the mountains. Manfred climbs to my nape,
speaks, but I do not hear him,
I'm too blue.
An elephant takes up his trumpet,
money flutters from the windows of cries, silk stretching its mirror
across shoulder blades. A gun is "fired."
One of me rushes
to window #13 and one of me raises his whip and one of me
flutters up from the center of the track amidst the pink flamingoes,
and underneath their hooves as they round the last turn my lips
are scarred and brown, brushed by tails, masked in dirt's lust,
definition, open mouths gasping for the cries of the bettors for the lungs
of earth.
So many of my transparencies could not resist the race!
Terror in earth, dried mushrooms, pink feathers, tickets,
a flaking moon drifting across the muddie ~ Frank O'Hara

[On Venice:] A wondrous city of fairest carving, reflected in gleaming waters swirled to new patterning by every passing gondola. ~ Sylvia Pankhurst

Magnus threw the curtains open and stepped onto the balcony of the hotel room. "Ah, Venice. There is no city in the world like you."
Alec trailed him outside and leaned over the railing. His gaze followed a gondola snaking along the canal and disappearing around a corner.
"It's a bit smelly."
"That's the ambiance."
Alec grinned. "Well, the ambiance is pretty strong. ~ Cassandra Clare

Blue jeans are the most beautiful things since the gondola. ~ Diana Vreeland

Back in August 1960 an American pilot called Joe Kittinger climbed into the open gondola beneath a balloon called Excelsior III and floated up to 102,800 feet. At this point, 20 miles above the Earth in what is technically space, he jumped. Moments later he became the first man to go through the sound barrier without the benefit of a plane. It was, and still is, the highest parachute jump ever, and it proved you can 'abandon ship' even when you're in space. ~ Jeremy Clarkson

I'd row a gondola like a column is not a row. My coffee may be cold, but my love is warm. When are you going to wake up and drink it? ~ Jarod Kintz

To go out in a gondola at night is to reconstruct in one's imagination the true Venice, the Venice of the past alive with romance, elopements, abductions, revenged passions, intrigues, adulteries, denouncements, unaccountable deaths, gambling, lute playing and singing. ~ Peggy Guggenheim

Saul tapped his wife's obstinate chin. "Mrs. Benedict, you certainly are. You promised to obey."
"That was thirty years ago! Before the wedding ceremony caught up with the modern age."
"Well, I for one am holding you to that. Gondola for two, in the moonlight, with champagne and roses. ~ Joss Stirling

Sailin' 'round the world in a dirty gondola
Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola! ~ Bob Dylan

New Orleans lives by the water and fights it, a sand castle set on a sponge nine feet below sea level, where people made music from heartache, named their drinks for hurricanes and joked that one day you'd be able to tour the city by gondola. ~ Nancy Gibbs

According to his diary he worked hard and without scruple to discover what he could on his own. Of course, in principle I have no objection to using human subjects, as long as they are already dead," she adds. "Have you heard of the anatomy theatre? It is where the medical school's dissections are performed. They use bears, monkeys, dogs, and human corpses too, when the weather is cool enough. The students have been known to kidnap a body the night before its dissection, dress it up, and take it for a gondola ride down the canal. ~ Maryrose Wood

Life is brief, young maiden, fall in love; before the crimson bloom fades from your lips, before the tides of passion cool within your hips, for those of you who know no tomorrow. (Gondola no Uta) ~ Kouhei Kadono

May you eat an unfamiliar dessert in a strange land at least once every three years. May you wake up ... and start dancing while you're still half-asleep. May you spray-paint Rilke poems as graffiti on highway overpasses ... My you learn to identify by name 20 flowers, 15 trees, 10 clouds, and one extrasolar planet ... May you dream of taking a trip to the moon in a gondola powered by firecrackers and wild swans. ~ Rob Brezsny

The gondola of London [a hansom]. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

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

And the next day the gondolier came with a train of other gondoliers, all decked in their holiday garb, and on his gondola sat Angela, happy, and blushing at her happiness. Then he and she entered the house in which I dwelt, and came into my room (and it was strange indeed, after so many years of inversion, to see her with her head above her feet!), and then she wished me happiness and a speedy restoration to good health (which could never be); and I in broken words and with tears in my eyes, gave her the little silver crucifix that had stood by my bed or my table for so many years. And Angela took it reverently, and crossed herself, and kissed it, and so departed with her delighted husband.
And as I heard the song of the gondoliers as they went their way
the song dying away in the distance as the shadows of the sundown closed around me
I felt that they were singing the requiem of the only love that had ever entered my heart. ~ W.S. Gilbert