The Leopard

by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Have we westerners achieved that stage too?

Huh, so long as people do the right thing, whether from religious belief or otherwise then they’re okay. Only by knowingly doing wrong are they damned.

fact ad maiorem gentis gloriam;

It would be as vile as those fish vendors insulting the condemned in the Piazza del Mercato sixty years before.

when all was said and done, his own death would in the first place mean that of the whole world?

“Her sheets must smell like Paradise.”