14 Quotes by Marlena De Blasi

We’re all who we are endlessly.

We believed the fairy tales we told our children and we loved them beyond reason even when we were green and bungling about it. We were children loving our children. And that’s who we are still.

All of Venice is tattered, resewn, achingly lovely, and like an enchantress, she disarms me, making off with the very breath of me.

Our babies cried when we left them and we cry when they leave us. Echoes. Proud almost to arrogance then, we pushed them about in their carriages. Dutifully, wearily now they push us about in our chairs.

Anyway nonna, grandmother, and everyone else has more sympathy for a whiff of failure than for the smell of new money.