Sentieri Italian Quotes

And as the Italian proverb says, 'Revenge is the dish which people of taste prefer to eat cold.' ~ Robert Hamer

Italian men are beautiful in the same way as French women, which is to say - no detail spared in the quest for perfection. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

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

I never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Do you know, when I am with you I am not afraid at all. It is a magic altogether curious that happens inside the heart. I wish I could take it with me when I leave.

It is sad, my Grey. We are constrained by the rules of this Game we play. There is not one little place under those rules for me to be with you happily. Or apart happily, which is what makes it so unfair.

I have discovered a curious fact about myself. An hour ago I was sure you were dead, and it hurt very much. Now you are alive, and it is only that I must leave you, and I find that even more painful. That is not at all logical.

Do you know the Symposium, Grey? The Symposium of Plato. [He] says that lovers are like two parts of an egg that fit together perfectly. Each half is made for the other, the single match to it. We are incomplete alone. Together, we are whole. All men are seeking that other half of themselves. Do you remember?

I think you are the other half of me. It was a great mix-up in heaven. A scandal. For you there was meant to be a pretty English schoolgirl in the city of Bath and for me some fine Italian pastry cook in Palermo. But the cradles were switched somehow, and it all ended up like this…of an impossibility beyond words.

I wish I had never met you. And in all my life I will not forget lying beside you, body to body, and wanting you. ~ Joanna Bourne

When Springsteen meets a future girlfriend on the boardwalk in Asbury Park, he delivers this electric introduction: "She was Italian, funny, a beatific tomboy, with just the hint of a lazy eye, and wore a pair of glasses that made me think of the wonders of the library. ~ Bruce Springsteen

That the Hindus, absorbed in the ideal, lacked in realistic observation is evident from this. Take painting and sculpture. What do you see in the Hindu paintings? All sorts of grotesque and unnatural figures. What do you see in a Hindu temple? A Chaturbhanga Narayana or some such thing. But take into consideration any Italian picture or Grecian statue-what a study of nature you find in them! A gentleman for twenty years sat burning a candle in his hand, in order to paint a lady carrying a candle in her hand. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Luca's grandfather (who
I hope is known as Nonno Spaghetti) gave him his first sky-blue Lazio jersey when the boy
was just a toddler. Luca, likewise, will be a Lazio fan until he dies.
"We can change our wives," he said. "We can change our jobs, our nationalities and even
our religions, but we can never change our team."
By the way, the word for "fan" in Italian is tifoso. Derived from the word for typhus. In other
words - one who is mightily fevered. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

In return, Giovanni told me that empathizing Italians say L'ho provato sulla mia pelle, which means 'I have experienced that on my own skin.' Meaning, I have also been burned or scarred in this way, and I know exactly what you're going through. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

The degree of personal freedom that exists in a society is determined more by the economic and technological structure of the society than by its laws or its form of government. Most of the Indian nations of New England were monarchies, and many of the cities of the Italian Renaissance were controlled by dictators. But in reading about these societies one gets the impression that they allowed far more personal freedom than our society does.
In part this was because they lacked efficient mechanisms for enforcing the ruler's will: There were no modern, well-organised police forces, no rapid long-distance communications, no surveillance cameras, no dossiers of information about the lives of average citizens. Hence it was relatively easy to evade control. ~ Theodore J. Kaczynski

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'd like to do a number of films. Westerns. Genre pieces. Maybe another film about Italian Americans where they're not gangsters, just to prove that not all Italians are gangsters. ~ Martin Scorsese

When I was invited to sing with Pavarotti, I had about two weeks to learn Italian. ~ Michael Bolton

I'm finishing my Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance history. ~ Peter Weller

How come we got the grumpy boat of bandy-legged Puritans? How come we didn't get the Italian party boat with the cappuccino makers and the gelato machine? That was the sexy boat, man. ~ Greg Proops

For all Italian people, family is very important. We don't fight with our families. ~ Domenico Dolce

I had a year off, so my wife and I were heading to Italy to study Italian. We found a little house in a village called Atrani. I discovered that Gore Vidal lived right above us in a big house, so I sent him a note. ~ Jay Parini

I really liked the food in Japan. There is something so organized, neat, and methodical about it. They put a lot of care and quality into their cooking. I also love Mediterranean, New American, and Italian food, because the cuisines borrow influences from all over the world. ~ Sasha Cohen

The symphony had its origin not in instrumental forms like the concerto grosso, as one might have expected, but in the overture of early Italian opera. The overture, or sinfonia, as it was called, as perfected by Alessandro Scarlatti consisted of three parts: fast-slow-fast, thus presaging the three movements of the classical symphony. ~ Aaron Copland

She walks into my life legs first, a long drink of water in the desert of my thirties. Her shoes are red; her eyes are green. She's an Italian flag in occupied territory, and I fall for her like Paris. She mixes my metaphors like a martini and serves up my heart tartare. They all do. Every time. They have to. It's that kind of story. ~ Catherynne M Valente

Fortunately the Italian people is not habituated to eating several times a day. ~ Benito Mussolini

This young woman," he indicated Miss Wintertowne, "she has, I dare say, all the usual accomplishments and virtues? She was graceful? Witty? Vivacious? Capricious? Danced like sunlight? Rode ilk the wind? Sang like an angel? Embroidered like Penelope? Spoke French, Italian, German, Breton, Welsh and many other languages?"
Mr. Norrell said he supposed so. He believed that those were the sorts of things young ladies did nowadays. ~ Susanna Clarke

She imagined the trade in meanings as a kind of game, in which tokens shaped like mahjong tiles were exchanged and switched. Signs moved from one world to another, clacked together, made new sequences. A man in Bolshevik Russia became virtually Chinese; a world unfolded from a paper envelope. This game existed in the borderless continent of her father's head. She could see how he concentrated: 'cher' in Russian, 'neve' in Italian, 'snow' in English, until he arrived at the sound 'xue', and then the character: the radical symbol for rain, the strokes for frozen, the little block of marks that revealed the transition from alphabets to ideograms. ~ Gail Jones

Sorrento, August. For two weeks now I haven't heard a German word or understood an Italian one. This way one can manage to live with people; everything goes like clockwork and no irksome misunderstanding can arise. ~ Karl Kraus

I see the face of a child. He lives in a great city. He is black. Or he is white. He is Mexican, Italian, Polish. None of that matters. What matters, he's an American child. ~ Richard M. Nixon

If Nonna sensed weakness, she'd zero in for the kill ~ Rosie Genova

She was exquisite, and he feared that he was blinded to everything else, that he was drawn to her by weakness, that his passion for her was incomplete. Know ing all too well the deeply religious love of the Italian poets for women they had merely seen on the street, he feared that his infatuation for Lia could never be compared to the elemental union that can occur between men and women when God is present and light surrounds them. ~ Mark Helprin

Then he swoops.

And I'm lost.

He kisses me like he's starving and I realize in the space between reality where my brain isn't fogged up by a sexy Italian, that he's hungry for me.

He's waited for me.

He's declaring his intentions for me.

It's hard to breathe when we part and I have no doubt how wet I am.

Just a kiss from Dominic can ruin my panties.

He rains his lips all over my face, holding the side of my head as he does. I'm all the way up on my toes, reaching for him, needing more of that intoxication he's giving out like confetti. ~ V. Theia

But very affectionately. Since you're up on the language, why don't we finish the night off by ... "
She rose up to whisper in his ear, ending the provocative Italian with a quick nip on his lobe.
"Ummm." He didn't have a clue what she'd said, but the blood had cheerfully drained out of his
head. "I think I'm going to need a translation on that one. ~ Nora Roberts

For me to write, I need to work my way back out of one home, consider another, and find the no-man's-land in between. I need to go to one Andre, unwrite that Andre, choose the other Andre across the way, only then go looking for the middle Andre, whose voice will most likely approximate the voice of an Andre able to camouflage all telltale signs that English is not his mother tongue, but that neither is French, nor Italian, nor Arabic. Writing must almost have to fail - it must almost not succeed. If it goes well from the start, if I am in the groove, if I come home to writing, it's not the writing for me. I need to have lost the key and to find no replacement. Writing is not a homecoming. Writing is an alibi. Writing is a perpetual stammer of alibis. ~ Andre Aciman

My wife spoke perfect Italian and she was very beautiful and very suave Italian men were crowding around her, talking all the time and if I was to even understand what was going on, I had to learn the language fast. ~ Clive James

First is the danger of futility; the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills - against misery and ignorance, injustice and violence. Yet many of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and 32-year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. "Give me a place to stand," said Archimedes, "and I will move the world." These men moved the world, and so can we all. ~ Robert F. Kennedy

For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian. ~ Donna Tartt

The English language is direct, unapologetic, and wonderfully amoral. Italian has a beautiful sound, but you cannot help but feel that you are always dealing with ghosts from the past and the looming dark presence of the Vatican. ~ Chiara Barzini