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I have been driven to search everywhere just to find myself mentioned.
Socrates said that the genius of tragedy is the same as that of comedy, but the remark is left unexplained in the text because the people to whom it was addressed were either asleep or drunk when he said it.
‘The innumerable smiles of the waves,’ a line by Aeschylus,
Their pleasure lay in catering for others, listening with exquisite prurience to their tales of woe and betrayal, and constructing a jigsaw image of the outside world from what they had heard.
our life was neolithic.
‘Does granite bleed,’ asked Francesco, ‘on Golgotha?’
perhaps at the very end he loved his vanishing life.)
I don’t know what they are, but they shall be the glory and the wonder of the world, they shall robe me about, as rich and gorgeous as the jewels of the saint.
For the first time in my life I shivered physically from something other than the cold; the world had sloughed away its skin and revealed itself as energy and light.
as Plato says, death might be “… a change, a migration of the soul from one place to another”.
She was saved by the rhythmic drone of planes. Drosoula ran inside, shouting, ‘Italians, Italians. It’s the invasion.’ ‘Thank God, thank God,’ thought Pelagia, realising almost immediately the absurdity, the bizarreness of her relief.
The second thing that struck me, curiously enough, was the incredible size and antiquity of the olive trees. They were blackened and gnarled, twisted and stout, they made me feel strangely ephemeral, as though they had seen people like us a thousand times, and had watched us depart.
He was prone to dramatic exaggeration in the telling of a story because everything about him was original, he was always larger than his circumstance, and he would say things for the sake of their value as amusement, with an ironic disregard for the truth. Generally he observed life with raised eyebrows, and he had none of that fragile self-pride that prevents a man from telling a joke against himself.
An admirer of Lord Byron wrote, ‘I dream’d that Greece might still be free’ in wobbly Roman letters, and General Tsolakoglou, the new quisling leader of the Greek people, appeared everywhere as a cartoon figure, committing various obscene and unpleasant acts with the Duce.
poignant air of solitude.
the new pax Romana,
It was a lovely and entertaining thing to sit outside his hut at night, watching the fireworks and eating cheese dunked in olive oil and thyme. It made him feel very much less alone, and he hoped wistfully that the war would not end before the festival of the saint.
Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.
we all owe a death to nature,
‘It has to leave reasons to history,’ said Corelli, ‘or else it stands condemned.
But the spirit of Carlo Guercio shall live in the light as long as we have tongues to speak of him and tales to tell our friends.
It churned the doctor’s heart to see her so faded, and he was reminded of those tattered roses that manage to survive the autumn and cling to their residual beauty until December, as if sustained by a certain dispensation of a fate that was nostalgic for the past but intent upon destruction at the last.
EVERY PARTING IS A FORETASTE OF DEATH
‘Non Ti Scorda Di Me’, ‘Core’n Grato’, ‘Parlami d’Amore’, or ‘La Donna e Mobile’.
‘Torna a Surriento
It was also because of the radio that she discovered that there were beautiful songs for women, and she sang ‘O Mio Babbino Caro’ at the top of her voice as she scrubbed the floor on her hands and knees, investing it with oriental microtones and adorning it with ululations, thus abnegating in the very attempt her project of becoming Italian.
it is nothing but a slow progress to my place beneath the soil,
for it seemed that even when players died, their vagrant music moved to other hands, and lived.
What troubled him was that all these pictures were taken in a present, a present that had gone. How can a present not be present? How did it come about that all that remained of so much life was little squares of stained paper with pictures on?
