Best 17 quotes of Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa on MyQuotes

Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

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    Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

    A house of which one knew every room wasn't worth living in.

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    Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

    All this shouldn't last; but it will, always; the human 'always' of course, a century, two centuries... and after that it will be different, but worse. We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.

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    Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

    As always the thought of his own death calmed him as much as that of others disturbed him: was it perhaps because, when all was said and done, his own death would in the first place mean that of the whole world?

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    Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

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

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    Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

    Nowhere has truth such a short life as in Sicily; a fact has scarcely happened five minutes before its genuine kernel has vanished, been camouflaged, embellished, disfigured, squashed, annihilated by imagination and self interest; shame, fear, generosity, malice, opportunism, charity, all the passions, good as well as evil, fling themselves onto the fact and tear it to pieces; very soon it has vanished altogether.

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    Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

    To rage and mock is gentlemanly, to grumble and whine is not.

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    Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

    All Sicilian expression, even the most violent, is really wish fulfillment: our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death; our laziness, our spiced and drugged sherbets, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is, for death again; our meditative air is that of a void wanting to scrutinize the enigmas of nirvana.

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    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.

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    Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

    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.

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    Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

    Noi fummo i Gattopardi, i Leoni; quelli che ci sostituiranno saranno gli sciacalletti, le iene; e tutti quanti gattopardi, sciacalli e pecore, continueremo a crederci il sale della terra." ("We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.")

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    Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

    Now the road was crossing orange groves in flower, and the nuptial scent of the blossoms absorbed the rest as a full moon does a landscape; the smell of sweating horses, the smell of leather from the carriage upholstery, the smell of Prince and the smell of Jesuit, were all cancelled out by that Islamic perfume evoking houris and fleshly joys beyond the grave.

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    Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

    She found herself even without the solace of being able to blame her own unhappiness on others, a solace which is the last deceiving philter of the desperate.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

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

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    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.