Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa Quotes

Como siempre, la consideración de su muerte lo serenaba tanto como lo turbaba la muerte de los demás. Tal vez porque, a fin de cuentas, su muerte era el final del mundo.

~ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

She was tall and well-made, on an ample scale; her skin looked as if it had the flavour of fresh cream which it resembled, her childlike mouth that of strawberries. Under a mass of raven hair, curling in gentle waves, her green eyes gleamed motionless as those of statues, and like them a little cruel. She was moving slowly, making her wide white skirt rotate around her, and emanating from her whole person the invincible calm of a woman sure of her own beauty.

~ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.

~ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

Those were the best days in the life of Tancredi and Angelica, lives later to be so variegated, so erring, against the inevitable background of sorrow. But that they did not know then; and they were pursuing a future which they deemed more concrete than it turned out to be, made of nothing but smoke and wind. When they were old and uselessly wise their thoughts would go back to those days with insistent regret; they had been days when desire was always present because it was always overcome, when many beds had been offered and refused, when the sensual urge, because restrained, had for one second been sublimated in renunciation, that is into real love.

~ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

The truth is that he wanted to draw a little comfort from gazing at the stars. There were still one or two up there, at the zenith. As always, seeing them revived him; they were distant, they were omnipotent and at the same time they were docile to his calculations; just the contrary to humans, always too near, so weak and yet so quarrelsome.

~ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

They are coming to teach us good manners! I replied in English. But they won't succeed, because we are gods.

~ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

…They're dangerous as all gifts from the sea are, the sea offers death as well as immortality.

~ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

A man of forty-five can consider himself still young till the moment comes when he realises that he has children old enough to fall in love.

~ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

There had been no enemies, just one single adversary, herself; her future had been killed by her own imprudence, by the reckless Salina pride; and now, just at the moment when her memories had come alive again after so many years, she found herself even without the solace of being able to blame her own unhappiness on others, a solace which is the last protective device of the desperate.

~ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa