The Leopard

by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

donnez-moi la force et le courage de contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans dégoût.

“And what news of the Prince?” “Prince” in Angelica’s mouth did not, alas, mean him, Don Fabrizio, but the little Garibaldino Captain; and this provoked a strange sensation in Salina,

we Sicilians have become accustomed, by a long, a very long hegemony of rulers who were not of our religion and who did not speak our language, to split hairs. If we had not done so we’d never have coped with Byzantine tax gatherers, with Berber Emirs, with Spanish Viceroys. Now the bent is endemic, we’re made like that.

this continual tension in everything, and these monuments, even, of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing around like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction, who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn’t understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind.”