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… donnez-moi la force et le courage de contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans dégoût.
If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.
“While there’s death there’s hope,”
Snobbery, in fact, is the opposite of envy.
free as he was from the shackles imposed on many other men by honesty, decency, and plain good manners, he moved through the jungle of life with the confidence of an elephant which advances in a straight line, rooting up trees and trampling down lairs, without even noticing scratches of thorns and moans from the crushed.
what would the Senate do with me, an inexperienced legislator who lacks the faculty of self-deception, essential requisite for wanting to guide others?
lacked those quick wits which in Sicily usurp the name of intelligence,
the Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery;
Everything expressed the serenity achieved by the dead man’s labors.
“I may be more intelligent, I’m certainly more cultivated, but I come from the same stock as they, with them I must make common cause.”
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.
Nowhere has truth so short a life as in Sicily; a fact has scarcely happened five minutes before its genuine kernel has vanished, been camouflaged, embellished, disfigured, squashed, annihilated by imagination and self-interest; shame, fear, generosity, malice, opportunism, charity, all the passions, good as well as evil, fling themselves onto the fact and tear it to pieces; very soon it has vanished altogether.
