39 Quotes by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

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

Why, he wondered, did God not want anyone to die with their own face on?

In her wake came Don Calogero, a rat escorting a rose: though his clothes had no elegance this time they were at least decent.

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.

Later the brothers had quarrelled, one of those family quarrels we all know with deeply entangled roots, impossible to cure because neither side speaks out clearly, each having much to hide.

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.

Love. Of course, love. Flames for a year, ashes for thirty.

La eternidad amorosa dura pocos años.

…And in truth, the sun, the seclusion, the nights passed beneath the wheeling stars, the silence, the scant nourishment, the study of remote subjects wove around me a spell that predisposed me to marvels.