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he arrived with the kinds of things that were to be expected from a man who had many years previously outrun any possible use for his money.
You don’t do things by halves. If you love a woman, you love her entirely. You give everything. You don’t spend your time in cafes; you don’t make love to other women; you don’t take her for granted. Do you understand?”
“But one thing God does not give, something that must be earned, something that a lazy man can never know. Call it understanding, grace, the elevation of the spirit—call it what you will. It comes only of work, sacrifice, and suffering. “You must give everything you have. You must love unto exhaustion, work unto exhaustion, and walk unto exhaustion.
Despite enough variation in the experience of a child by the age of fourteen to show him twenty times over that life is stupefying and complex, a single great force drove him forward and gave him both the momentum he would need for the rest of his life and the immediate resilience for surviving the blows he attracted with his adolescent stupidities and excesses.
factional paralysis made Italy weak on the international stage, and, second, it exaggerated inconsistency and volatility in internal matters.
When you get older, battles of any sort become far less interesting than what led to them and what they brought about.
When greater forces are immobilized, the splinter factions run riot.
When people write violent absurdities on the walls of a city, the city becomes violent and absurd.
your youth is a magical instrument with which you can accomplish anything.”
“If you really want to enjoy life, you must work quietly and humbly to realize your delusions of grandeur.”
I’m not afraid to die, because I know that what I have seen will not fade, and will someday spring full blown from someone not yet born, who did not know me, or my time, or what I loved. I know for sure.”
“You keep them alive not by skill, not by art, not by memory, but by love. When you understand that, you won’t be afraid to die.
You live on not by virtue of the things you have amassed, or the work you have done, but through your spirit, in ways and by means that you can neither control nor foresee.
I try not to overdo it, but I’m not feeble like many men my age.”
For perhaps the first time in his life he was lifted entirely outside himself and separated from his wants.
it’s pleasurable to cast a line into the future, no matter how tenuously. You never know, the line may be unbroken all the way to the last judgment.
as the mountains acted upon them and their spirits were calmed and enlarged, they saw the difference between what they once had been and what they had become.
he felt a weightless chill when he recognized the irresponsive silence of great height.
people who lived in the mountains knew that all the truly great things had already been accomplished.
Everyone has a self-made pass for travel through the terror and sadness of the world, and because, in the end, nothing is sufficient, everyone wants to share his own method, hoping for strength in numbers.
Why do you think great leaders and great orations are coincident with wars, revolutions, and the founding or ending of governments and states? Common interests then are so clear that speeches are effortlessly drawn, but at present neither the facts nor the consequences are sufficiently clear to make oratory legitimate. This is the kind of war that will wind on and make fools of its partisans and opponents both.”
thirty days there taught him that, rather than his own abilities, it was chance that kept him alive.
Rooted in the stillness, Alessandro was like a farmer watching a blaze consume the forest at the edge of his fields.
The world was going to be torn to pieces. In the driving apart of so many families, every family would be driven apart;
he wondered if, left with nothing familiar and no sign of anyone he loved, he would be able even to think of starting over.
with age you receive the gift of friction. The less time you have, the more you suffer, the more you feel, the more you observe, and the more slowly time moves even as it races ahead.”
Old men on their deathbeds call for their fathers not because they are afraid, but because they have seen time bend back upon itself.”
As I’ve grown older I’ve seen that the world is made of perfect balances and exact compensations. The heavier the burden and the closer you get to the end, the more viscous time becomes, and you see, in slow motion, intimations of eternity.”
I sometimes forget where I am. But that’s all right, young man, because, sometimes, to forget where you are makes you feel very light and free.”
Bindo Altoviti was saying, half with longing, half with delight, “These are the things in which I was so helplessly caught up, the waves that took me, what I loved. When light filled my eyes and I was restless and could move, I knew not what all the color was about, but only that I had a passion to see. And now that I am still, I pass on to you my liveliness and my life, for you will be taken, as once I was, and although you must fight beyond your capacity to fight and feel beyond your capacity to feel, remember that it ends in perfect peace,
If I weren’t a soldier, I might not have learned to stand against all odds.”
what happens when you let go, when your strength leaves you and you sink into darkness, when there’s nothing that you or anyone else can do, no matter how desperate you are, no matter how you try? Perhaps it’s then, when you have neither pride nor power, that you are saved, brought to an unimaginably great reward.”
In war it’s dangerous to be experienced, battle-hardened, and decimated, because you are at once necessary and expendable.
“In history, Guariglia, will is only an illusion and success does not last. You can only do your best in the short time you have.
The prow of the cattle boat cut through the sea and rolled it into chattering foam that said the same thing over and over before it fell asleep in the waves.
Alessandro prayed with all the gravity and passion that were in him for that which he had once merely taken for granted.
“You don’t care what anyone else thinks, do you?” “No, Papa. I never did.” “That can only be because you believe.” “Yes.” “And how does God speak to you?” “In the language of everything that is beautiful.”
they spoke in the considered manner of young men who are given the task of controlling events that they do not yet comprehend and that they do not yet know are uncontrollable.
He didn’t blame them for their efforts. To the contrary, he was seduced by the hope that seemed to come to them so easily.
in memory, things, objects, and sensations merely stand in for the people you love.”
you probably can’t know it until you’re condemned to die.” “You’re always condemned to die. It’s just a matter of timing.”
“I don’t want to be like you,” he said. “I don’t want to be a muscle-bound bread-eating jackass who sings in a fart chorus.”
if a soldier were lucky enough to survive the war he would spend the rest of his life trying to figure it out.
trying to make sense of memories that never fell into place.
If you survive, you’ll be able to remember having been there. You’ll recall it fifty years from now, in some quiet place, surrounded by children, not a single one knowing the folly to which you were committed, and all sweetly ready to commit it anew.”
“Perhaps passing through the gates of death is like passing quietly through the gate in a pasture fence. On the other side, you keep walking, without the need to look back. No shock, no drama, just the lifting of a plank or two in a simple wooden gate in a clearing. Neither pain, nor floods of light, nor great voices, but just the silent crossing of a meadow.”
When soldiers go home, their first desire, whether they know it or not, is to have children, children being the only antidote for war.
the world had a life of it own. Leave winter alone or watch it to death, it would still gradually turn to summer.
were time not to have at its end the absence of time, and the absence of time not to have been preceded by time, neither would be of any consequence.
She wanted a man who had seen the bodies lined up in rows, the tatters, the endless columns of exhausted soldiers walking bitterly from place to place, the corpses sprawled over the wire. She would not know how to talk to a man who hadn’t seen these things, as she had,
