Best 67 quotes in «venice quotes» category

It seemed like a magical city, floating on the lagoon as if conjured by an enchanter's wand. I sat in the meadow and stared at it, picking meadow flowers from around my feet- clover and daisies and wild garlic- and making myself a wreath.

It took Feyra some time to realise that she was not delirious: the citizens were wearing painted masks.From childhood she had heard the legend that the Venetians were half human, half beast.She knew that this could not be true, but in the swirling fog of this hellish city she almost believed it. The creatures seemed to stare at her down their warped noses from their blank and hollow eyes. And overlord of all was the winged lion - he was everywhere, watching from every plaque or pennant, ubiquitous and threatening.

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. Alvise

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.

Mom, you know what? I just realized you have a knack for making people disappear. [Lella's son catches on!]

Listen,” whispers Dario. “How still it is.” They stand under a darkened archway, the only sound a whispered squeak where docked gondolas rub against each other. Negative ions from the lapping water release serotonin, and the brains of these two flood with the nourishment of each other’s breath, each other’s chi.

Lorenzo: In such a night stood Dido with a willow in her hand upon the wild sea-banks, and waft her love to come again to Carthage Jessica: In such a night Medea gathered the enchanted herbs that did renew old Aeson. Lorenzo: In such a night did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew, and with an unthrift love did run from Venice, as far as Belmont. Jessica: In such a night did young Lorenzo swear he lov'd her well, stealing her soul with many vows of faith, and ne'er a true one. Lorenzo: In such a night did pretty Jessica (like a little shrow) slander her love, and he forgave it her. Jessica: I would out-night you, did nobody come; but hark, I hear the footing of a man.

Maybe I had been making a greater monster of him than he really was, or maybe I was still under his influence, for I was certain that he wanted me to believe he was no more than a harmless man who happened to use vampirism to get what he desired. Some remnant of his mesmerism was still upon me. I had never been able to shake the feeling that he was tucked away in a corner of my mind, that he could read my thoughts, know what I was thinking. He had done something to me, but what that was, I had never been able to discover. All I knew was that the feeling had been with me since the morning I woke up and found myself in Venice.

Sleep: the moon still hasn't moved the width of a constellation since you were a girl. Since you have become a woman, the stars that stand above the halls of Palladios have not yet disappeared behind the domes of San Marco. But only since then has the world become the world.

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.

She leaned against the bridge’s warm marble balustrade, and looked as far down the darkening canal as the setting sun would allow. She wondered if others appreciated Venice’s beauty and fragility as deeply as she had come to or if, like a raging fever, the city infected some while avoiding others. She sighed at the grandeur and at the resilience that surrounded her, and she promised herself she’d try to be more like Venice.

She never imagined that at twenty years old she'd already be a widow in black. On the bright side, she was no longer married to Dario, but her future still looked grim.

Turning her body slightly to the left, he gently bends her knee, breaking eye contact to lick her slowly, from Venice to Trieste—then down the Croatian Coast, the length of Serenissima.

That's what lay behind the feud under way in the Republic: a battle between different noble family factions in a fight for power. Serving this side or the other was of no interest to Mathias. But the consequences of a Venice under the Pope's direct control weren't at all to his liking. His beloved books would be burned by ignorant, avid priests. Men like Malachia would win. It was the same old struggle. The same fight Gheorg had chosen, the same fight that might take him to Wittenberg. But he wouldn't clear the way for Alexander VI. With what little strength he possessed, even though he was nothing more than a pawn of a chessboard, that extended farther then he could see, Mathias would help those in power smash what had all the makings of a major plot, one designed to overturn the government in power in La Serenissima. And these thoughts allowed the monk to find the first answer to the many question with which he still felt burdened. He and the Borgias did NOT share the same Church.

The two had been together since they were little girls, and so loved and hated each other like sisters.

Local fog in Venice has a name: nebbia. It obliterates all reflections ... and everything that has a shape: buildings, people, colonnades, bridges, statues. Boat services are canceled, airplanes neither arrive, nor take off for weeks, stores are closed and mail ceases to litter one’s threshold. The effect is as though some raw hand had turned all those enfilades inside out and wrapped the lining around the city... the fog is thick, blinding, and immobile... this is a time for reading, for burning electricity all day long, for going easy on self-deprecating thoughts of coffee, for listening to the BBC World Service, for going to bed early. In short, a time for self-oblivion, induced by a city that has ceased to be seen. Unwittingly, you take your cue from it, especially if, like it, you’ve got company. Having failed to be born here, you at least can take some pride in sharing its invisibility...

Venice is a Dorian Gray city. Somewhere up there in the world's attic, there's another place with the haggard, poxed and ravaged face of unspeakable evil. And I suspect it's Cardiff.

Venice was a contrast from Los Angeles itself, where you might see a woman with $15,000 tits, a face frozen in place by Botox, wobbling with her $4,000 Gucci bag right past a child with a sunken belly and exposed ribs encaging a heart too weak to scream.

Venice, it's temples and palaces did seem like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.

VISIONS OF GRANDEUR I'm walking through a sheet of glass instead of the door, Flying over a giant candlestick lighting up Central Park, Repeating two courses at Hard Knock's College, And swimming through the Red Sea with silky jelly fish. I'm hopping over an empty row house in Philadelphia, Getting a seventy dollar manicure on a gondola in Venice, Wearing a white pearl necklace stolen from Goodwill, And running my first New York City marathon. I'm discussing the meaning of life with my late cat Charlie. Dating John Doe- the thirty-third chef at the White House, Running non-stop on a broken leg through a bomb-blasted city, And keeping a multi-lingual monkey named Alfredo as my pet. I'm spying on two hundred and twenty-two homegrown terrorists from Iowa, Worshiped by a red-headed gorilla named Salamander, Sleeping with a giant teddy bear dressed in black leather, And wearing hot pink lipstick over a shade of midnight blue.

Well, he'd gone this far, animated by nothing more noble than curiosity, he told himself as he studied the face of the man in the mirror, pushing his collar down over his neatly knotted tie. The man's mind slipped into English: The cat's got your tongue. Curiosity killed the cat. To stay in vein, the man in the mirror gave a Cheshire smile, and Brunetti left the house.

Why, then, do you go there at such a season?" my editor asked me once, sitting in a Chinese restaurant in New York, with his gay English charges. "Yes, why do you ?" they echoed their prospective benefactor. "What is it like there in winter ?" I thought of telling them about acqua alta; about the various shades of gray in the window as one sits for breakfast in one's hotel, enveloped by silence and the mealy morning pall of newlyweds' faces; about pigeons accentuating every curve and cornice of the local Baroque in their dormant affinity for architecture; about a lonely monument to Francesco Querini and his two huskies carved out of Istrian stone, similar, I think, in its hue, to what he saw last, dying, on his ill-fated journey to the North Pole, now listening to the Giardini's rustle of evergreens in the company of Wagner and Carducci; about a brave sparrow perching on the bobbing blade of a gondola against the backdrop of a sirocco-roiled damp infinity. No, I thought, looking at their effete but eager faces; no, they won't do. "We;;, I said, "it's like Greta Garbo swimming.

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.

The eye in this city acquires an autonomy similar to that of a tear. The only difference is that it doesn't sever itself from the body but subordinates it totally. After a while - on the third or fourth day here- the body starts to regard itself as merely the eye's carrier, as a kind of submarine to its now dilating, now squinting periscope. Of course, for all its targets, its explosions are invariably self-inflicted: it's own heart, or else your mind, that sinks; the eye pops up to the surface. This, of course, owes to local topography, to the streets - narrow, meandering like eels - that finally bring you to a flounder of a campo with a cathedral in the middle of it, barnacled with saints and flaunting its Medusa-like cupolas. No matter what you set out for as you leave the house here, you are bound to get lost in these long, coiling lanes and passageways that beguile you to see them through to follow them to their elusive end, which usually hits water, so that you can't even call it a cul-de-sac. On the map this city looks like two grilled fish sharing a plate, or perhaps like two nearly overlapping lobster claws ( Pasternak compared it to a swollen croissant); but it has no north, south, east, or west; the only direction it has is sideways. It surrounds you like frozen seaweed, and the more you dart and dash about trying to get your bearings, the more you get lost. The yellow arrow signs at intersections are not much help either, for they, too, curve. In fact, they don't so much help you as kelp you. And in the fluently flapping hand of the native whom you stop to ask for directions, the eye, oblivious to his sputtering, A destra, a sinistra, dritto, dritto, readily discerns a fish.

Why, then, do you go there at such a season?" my editor asked me once, sitting in a Chinese restaurant in New York, with his gay English charges. "Yes, why do you ?" they echoed their prospective benefactor. "What is it like there in winter ?" I thought of telling them about acqua alta; about the various shades of gray in the window as one sits for breakfast in one's hotel, enveloped by silence and the mealy morning pall of newlyweds' faces; about pigeons accentuating every curve and cornice of the local Baroque in their dormant affinity for architecture; about a lonely monument to Francesco Querini and his two huskies carved out of Istrian stone, similar, I think, in its hue, to what he saw last, dying, on his ill-fated journey to the North Pole, now listening to the Giardini's rustle of evergreens in the company of Wagner and Carducci; about a brave sparrow perching on the bobbing blade of a gondola against the backdrop of a sirocco-roiled damp infinity. No, I thought, looking at their effete but eager faces; no, they won't do. "Well, I said, "it's like Greta Garbo swimming.

Do all men kill the things they do not love ............ The quality of mercy is not strain'd It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest It blesseth him that gives and him that takes

Arguably, the Venice Film Festival is the second best film festival in the world, after Cannes.

At 6 p.m. I stood in the doorway of my studio facing the Venice boardwalk. A few spectators watched as I pushed two live electric wires into my chest. The wires crossed and exploded, burning me but saving me from electrocution.

....decay and disfavor came together as other parts of the coast were developed, and the canals became weed-clogged ditches breeding mosquitoes, and the hotels were turned into third-rate apartments.

Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing, more than any man in all Venice. His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff: you shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them, they are not worth the search.

I am like a caricature of myself, and I like that. It is like a mask. And for me the Carnival of Venice lasts all year long.

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.

If anything can rival Venice in its beauty, it must be its reflection at sunset in the Grand Canal.

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

I live in one of the coastal cities in Southern California, and every so often I like to take a walk down the boardwalk in Venice during the weekends when it is abuzz with lively activity.

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

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

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano!

I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs; A palace and a prison on each hand; I saw from out the wave of her structure's rise As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand: A thousand years their cloudy wings expand Around me, and a dying Glory smiles O'er the far times, when many a subject land Look'd to the winged Lion's marble pines, Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles.

I was in Venice teaching, so I reread Henry James's "The Wings of the Dove." I love James.

Like Venice, Italy, New Orleans is a cultural treasure. And everyone who lived in the city should be allowed to come back. But that doesn't mean that they all should live in exactly the same spot that they lived before.

Quentin [Tarantino] called me and said: "Yeah, you've got to be in my movie. You've got to be in Death Proof." But he made me audition. I was like: "Dude, I don't even want to do this..." So I left the casting of Hostel: Part II to drive to Venice, where Quentin was holding his casting, and the person ahead of me was Derek Richardson from Hostel 1 and he was like: "Dude, what are you doing here?" I said: "Don't ask!

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

[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.

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.

Rome is stately and impressive; Florence is all beauty and enchantment; Genoa is picturesque; Venice is a dream city; but Naples is simply -- fascinating.

The classical allusions and the Platonic disquisitions on beauty are no longer a form of cover, but integral to Aschenbach's complex sexuality. Moreover, the wandering around Venice in pursuit of Tadzio isn't a prelude to some sexual contact for which Aschenbach is yearning.

This grossly advertised wonder [Venice], this gold idol with clay feet, this trompe-l'oeil, this painted deception, this cliche-what intelligent iconoclast could fail to experience a destructive impulse in her presence?

The quality of mercy is not strained

Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes.