Ognissanti Venice Quotes

I intend Deaths in Venice to contribute both to literary criticism and to philosophy. But it's not "strict philosophy" in the sense of arguing for specific theses. As I remark, there's a style of philosophy - present in writers from Plato to Rawls - that invites readers to consider a certain class of phenomena in a new way. In the book, I associate this, in particular, with my good friend, the eminent philosopher of science, Nancy Cartwright, who practices it extremely skilfully. ~ Philip Kitcher

By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet
did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods;
since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage,
but music for the time doth change his nature.
The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
and his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music. ~ William Shakespeare

Perhaps it is because Venice is both liquid and solid, both air and stone, that it somehow combines all the elements crucial to make our imaginations ignite and turn fantasies into realities. ~ Erica Jong

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottage princes' palaces. ~ William Shakespeare

She dreamed of Venice. However, it wasn't a city alive with stars dripping like liquid gold into canals, or Bougainvillea spilling from flowerpots like overfilled glasses of wine. In this dream, Venice was without color. Where pastel palazzi once lined emerald lagoons, now, gray, shadowy mounds of rubble paralleled murky canals. Lovers could no longer share a kiss under the Bridge of Sighs; it had been the target of an obsessive Allied bomb in search of German troops. The only sign of life was in Piazza San Marco, where the infamous pigeons continued to feed. However, these pigeons fed not on seeds handed out by children, but on corpses rotting under the elongated shadow of the Campanile. ~ Pamela Allegretto

For about 150 days a year in Venice, the sun doesn't show through the mist until noon. ~ Ray Bradbury

My meaning in saying he is a good man, is to have you understand me that he is sufficient. ~ William Shakespeare

I came up with a parallel Venice called Venus. set in a parallel Venice about 1701. ~ Tanith Lee

I don't want to be in my car all day. I love getting up in the morning in Venice and walking my dogs down to the cafe to get my tea, and then perhaps going to a bookstore and sitting and reading, then walking to the beach. ~ Jessica Chastain

It is the custom of Venice to paint on canvas, either because it does not split and is not worm-eaten, or because pictures can be made of any size desired, or else for convenience ... so that they can be sent anywhere with very little trouble and expense. ~ Giorgio Vasari

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

How many things by season season'd are, To their right praise and true perfection! ~ William Shakespeare

But love is blind and lovers cannot see ~ William Shakespeare

I have an Italian comedy at the Venice Film Festival. ~ Robert Englund

Paris is an ideal place to become informed, while Venice is a place to think and write. ~ Pontus Hulten

I understand the circumstances, and I chose you. Amore mio, you must believe that nothing can change my choice or how much I love you. There's only one person who can keep me from you, and that's you. ~ Marie Ohanesian Nardin

Here at this far lost end of the continent, where the trail wagons had stopped and the people with them ... ~ Ray Bradbury

Now is the winter of our discontent. ~ William Shakespeare

That night we made love "the real way" which we had not yet attempted
although married six months.
Big mystery. No one knew where to put their leg and to this day I'm not sure
we got it right.
He seemed happy. You're like Venice he said beautifully.
Early next day
I wrote a short talk ("On Defloration") which he stole and had published
in a small quarterly magazine.
Overall this was a characteristic interaction between us.
Or should I say ideal.
Neither of us had ever seen Venice. ~ Anne Carson

I know a lady in Venice would have walked barefoot to Palestine for a touch of his nether lip ~ William Shakespeare

This is the spirit of the enchantment under which Venice lies, pearly and roseate, like the Sleeping Beauty, changeless throughout the centuries, arrested, while the concrete forest of the modern world grows up around her. ~ Mary McCarthy

A Corymbus for Autumn
How are the veins of thee, Autumn, laden?
Umbered juices,
And pulpèd oozes
Pappy out of the cherry-bruises,
Froth the veins of thee, wild, wild maiden.
With hair that musters
In globèd clusters,
In tumbling clusters, like swarthy grapes,
Round thy brow and thine ears o'ershaden;
With the burning darkness of eyes like pansies,
Like velvet pansies
Where through escapes
The splendid might of thy conflagrate fancies;
With robe gold-tawny not hiding the shapes
Of the feet whereunto it falleth down,
Thy naked feet unsandalled;
With robe gold-tawny that does not veil
Feet where the red
Is meshed in the brown,
Like a rubied sun in a Venice-sail. ~ Francis Thompson

In a tavern in Fulkeston, Tristran gained great renown by reciting from memory Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," the Twenty-Third Psalm, the "Quality of Mercy" speech from The Merchant of Venice, and a poem about a boy who stood on the burning deck where all but he had fled, each of which he had been obliged to commit to memory in his school days. He ~ Neil Gaiman

What about damp? What about flooding? Wouldn't it make sense to have a little lawn or garden as a sort of buffer zone between the house and the water? But then it wouldn't be Venice, said Connie's voice in my head. Then it would be Staines. ~ David Nicholls

Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit. ~ Norman Mailer

Dearest Charles
I found a box of this paper at the back of a bureau so I must write to you as I am mourning for my lost innocence. It never looked like living. The doctors despaired of it from the start ... I am never quite alone. Members of my family keep turning up and collecting luggage and going away again, but the white raspberries are ripe. 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. Love or what you will. S. ~ Evelyn Waugh

I can cope with, and even somehow enjoy, the sinking melancholy of Venice, just for a few days. Somewhere in me I am able to recognize that this is not my melancholy; this is the city's own indigenous melancholy, and I am healthy enough these days to be able to feel the difference between me and it. This is a sign, I cannot help but think, of healing, of the coagulation of my self. There were a few years there, lost in borderless despair, when I used to experience all the world's sadness as my own. Everything sad leaked through me and left damp traces behind. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

The pope being informed of the great increase of Protestantism, in the year 1542 sent inquisitors to Venice to make an inquiry into the matter, and apprehend such as they might deem obnoxious persons. ~ John Foxe

Venissa is a perfect destination for day-trippers from Venice proper who are searching for great food and a little adventure; it's a 30-minute jaunt by vaporetto from St. Mark's, quicker by water taxi. ~ Roger Morris

The menu at the Hug Deli included, among other items, the Warm and Fuzzy Hug, the Beverly Hills Air Kiss Hug, and the Gangsta Hug, with side orders of Pinch, Tickle, and Back Scratch. She ordered the Long Uncomfortable Hug, because she thought that was funny, thereby prompting a nut-brown Venice Beach-looking dude to hold on to her, earnestly pokerfaced, for a seeming eternity.
"Are you uncomfortable yet?"
"Fairly, yes."
"Excellent. My work here is done."
She laughed and mounted on her bike, pedalling away from the zany mirage as her gratuitous hugger shouted "Namaste" in her direction. ~ Armistead Maupin

Ships are but boards, sailors but men. ~ William Shakespeare

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

My first impression of Venice was that it might be hard to make anything happen there. Everything seemed to have already happened. Venice seemed like a kind of exalted remembering. ~ Glenn Haybittle

Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall. ~ Jerry Saltz

In law, what plea so tainted and corrupts, but being seasoned with a gracious voice obscures the show of evil. ~ William Shakespeare

Look not just at the Roman campagna, the pageantry of Venice, and the proud expression of Charles I astride his horse, but also have a look at the bowl on the sideboard, the dead fish in your kitchen, and the crusty bread loaves in the hall. ~ Alain De Botton

State your name."
"Venice Huber."
"Occupation?"
"Well, it's hard to say. I don't model, land of the seventeen bimbos. I don't act - after all, isn't an actress just a model who won't shut up? Let's say, oh - homemaker. Could you die? ~ Paul Rudnick

It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone. ~ Erica Jong

History and legend and art and romance meet and mingle to create that indefinable sorcery of Venice. It is like nothing on earth except a poet's dream ... ~ Lilian Whiting

You travel the world, you go see different things. I like to see Shakespeare plays, so I'll go - I mean, even if it's in a different language. I don't care, I just like Shakespeare, you know. I've seen Othello and Hamlet and Merchant of Venice over the years, and some versions are better than others. Way better. It's like hearing a bad version of a song. But then somewhere else, somebody has a great version. ~ Bob Dylan

[On Venice:] Every hour of the day is a miracle of light. In summer with daybreak the rising sun produces such a tender magic on the water that it nearly breaks one's heart. ~ Peggy Guggenheim

Dorothy's coming up. I think she's tight."
"That's great." I picked up my bathrobe. "I was afraid I was going to have to get some sleep."
She was bending over looking for her slippers. "Don't be such an old fluff. You can sleep all day." She found her slippers and stood up in them. "Is she really as afraid of her mother as she says?"
"If she's got any sense. Mimi's poison."
Nora screwed up her dark eyes at me and asked slowly: "What are you holding out on me?"
"Oh, dear," I said, " I was hoping I wouldn't have to tell you. Dorothy is really my daughter. I didn't know what I was doing, Nora. It was spring in Venice and I was so young and there was a moon over the ... "
"Be funny. Don't you want something to eat? ~ Dashiell Hammett

Hold all men in mind as being healthy, happy, and prosperous. When you do this you are helping others and sowing good for yourself. Always send out thoughts of love and service. They will come back to you laden with their kind. ~ Venice J. Bloodworth

Lella York, the self-proclaimed queen of passive-aggressive behavior. [Lella's perceptive view of herself] ~ Maria Grazia Swan

There are two Venices I know about and one of them is a hotel in Vegas. The other is an L.A. beach where pretty girls walk their dogs while wearing as little as possible and mutant slabs of tanned, posthuman beef sip iced steroid lattes and pump iron until their pecs are the size of Volkswagens. ~ Richard Kadrey

Tokyo is too close up to see, sometimes. There are no distances and everything is above your head - dentists, kindergartens, dance studios. Even the roads and walkways are up on murky stilts. An evil-twin Venice with all the water drained away. ~ David Mitchell

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage where every man must play a part, And mine is a sad one. ~ William Shakespeare

Tossing a smile my way I nodded back to her. Veronica had come home. Somewhere in a thirty-six dollar a night shack a Nazi dwarf was making it with two call girls. Los Angeles was one hell of a city. ~ David Louden