Venice Quotes

“Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“There is still one of which you never speak.'

Marco Polo bowed his head.

'Venice,' the Khan said.

Marco smiled. 'What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?'

The emperor did not turn a hair. 'And yet I have never heard you mention that name.'

And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“One year from now, a decade, a century, half a millennium, will things be different? Dare we dream it? When we are seen for ourselves, not just as the conduit of progeny, heirs, lineage, not just as beautiful objects to be protected, inspected, appreciated, but for who we are at the core . . .”
― Gina Buonaguro, The Virgins of Venice

“We didn't stow away!" Dan protested. "You sunk our boat and pulled us out of the canal!"
"Good point," Ian agreed. "Return them to the canal. Roughly, please.”
― Gordon Korman, One False Note

“Nellie grinned. "I always wanted to go to Venice. It's supposed to be the romance capital of the world."
"Sweet," put in Dan. "Too bad your date is an Egyptian Mau on a hunger strike."
The au pair sighed. "Better than an eleven-year-old with a big mouth.”
― Gordon Korman, One False Note

“A midwife knows too much . . .  But if she is truly a wise woman, she knows when to keep her mouth shut.”
― Gina Buonaguro, The Virgins of Venice

“Knowing I should get into the habit of praying on my knees before bed, I shrugged and instead huddled under the bedcovers, the rose clasped in my hands close to my heart. The stem was very long, with all thorns removed, and an old Venetian saying came to mind: The longer the stem, the greater the love.”
― Gina Buonaguro, The Virgins of Venice

“Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.”
― Truman Capote

“The day was perfect. Hot, yes, but with a refreshing zephyr sidling in from the west. The lagoon was flecked with small islands, and beyond lay the more ominous mainland, the papal army camped somewhere on it. But here, on this beautiful islet far from our usual universe, a warrior pope seemed a figment.”
― Gina Buonaguro, The Virgins of Venice

“The evening blessed us with a sunset to rival a painting by Carpaccio in its colours. The sky mutated from shades of ultramarine and azure to vermilion and ochre, then strips of violet and finally indigo.”
― Gina Buonaguro, The Virgins of Venice

“Getting lost is the only place worth going to.”
― Tiziano Scarpa

“We stood for a moment, the brackish canal water teething at the stone,the last of the stars fading as the sky transformed from black to indigo. A pair of swans like large white clouds floated on the water, their heads tucked under their wings, as a gondola pulled up, a lantern on the prow, the gondolier on the stern, rubbing his sleepy eyes.”
― Gina Buonaguro

“Despite the convent walls, when I was writing, my mind was free.”
― Gina Buonaguro, The Virgins of Venice

“It's temples and palaces did seem
Like fabrics of enchantment pil'd to heaven.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation

“And off in the far distance, the gold on the wings of the angel atop the bell tower of San Marco flashed in the sun, bathing the entire city in its glistening benediction.”
― Donna Leon, Death in a Strange Country

“In winter you wake up in this city, especially on Sundays, to the chiming of its innumerable bells, as though behind your gauze curtains a gigantic china teaset were vibrating on a silver tray in the pearl-gray sky. You fling the window open and the room is instantly flooded with this outer, peal-laden haze, which is part damp oxygen, part coffee and prayers. No matter what sort of pills, and how many, you've got to swallow this morning, you feel it's not over for you yet. No matter, by the same token, how autonomous you are, how much you've been betrayed, how thorough and dispiriting in your self-knowledge, you assume there is still hope for you, or at least a future. (Hope, said Francis Bacon, is a good breakfast but bad supper.) This optimism derives from the haze, from the prayer part of it, especially if it's time for breakfast. On days like this, the city indeed acquires a porcelain aspect, what with all its zinc-covered cupolas resembling teapots or upturned cups, and the tilted profile of campaniles clinking like abandoned spoons and melting in the sky. Not to mention the seagulls and pigeons, now sharpening into focus, now melting into air. I should say that, good though this place is for honeymoons, I've often thought it should be tried for divorces also - both in progress and already accomplished. There is no better backdrop for rapture to fade into; whether right or wrong, no egoist can star for long in this porcelain setting by crystal water, for it steals the show. I am aware, of course, of the disastrous consequence the above suggestion may have for hotel rates here, even in winter. Still, people love their melodrama more than architecture, and I don't feel threatened. It is surprising that beauty is valued less than psychology, but so long as such is the case, I'll be able to afford this city - which means till the end of my days, and which ushers in the generous notion of the future.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“She leaned against the bridge’s warm marble balustrade, and looked as far down the darkening canal as the setting sun would allow. She wondered if others appreciated Venice’s beauty and fragility as deeply as she had come to or if, like a raging fever, the city infected some while avoiding others. She sighed at the grandeur and at the resilience that surrounded her, and she promised herself she’d try to be more like Venice.”
― Marie Ohanesian Nardin, Beneath the Lion's Wings

“By day it is filled with boat traffic - water
buses, delivery boats, gondolas - if something floats
and it's in Venice, it moves along the Grand Canal.
And by daylight it is one of the glories of the Earth.
But at night, especially when the moon is full
and the soft illumination reflects off the water and
onto the palaces - I don't know how to describe
it so I won't, but if you died and in your will you
asked for your ashes to be spread gently on the
Grand Canal at midnight with a full moon,
everyone would know this about you - you loved and understood beauty.”
― William Goldman, The Silent Gondoliers

“The experts are right, he thought. Venice is sinking. The whole city is slowly dying. One day the tourists will travel here by boat to peer down into the waters, and they will see pillars and columns and marble far, far beneath them, slime and mud uncovering for brief moments a lost underworld of stone. Their heels made a ringing sound on the pavement and the rain splashed from the gutterings above. A fine ending to an evening that had started with brave hope, with innocence. ("Don't Look Now")”
― Daphne du Maurier, Echoes from the Macabre: Selected Stories

“Streets flooded. Please advise.”
― Robert Benchley

“She dreamed of Venice. However, it wasn’t a city alive with stars dripping like liquid gold into canals, or Bougainvillea spilling from flowerpots like overfilled glasses of wine. In this dream, Venice was without color. Where pastel palazzi once lined emerald lagoons, now, gray, shadowy mounds of rubble paralleled murky canals. Lovers could no longer share a kiss under the Bridge of Sighs; it had been the target of an obsessive Allied bomb in search of German troops. The only sign of life was in Piazza San Marco, where the infamous pigeons continued to feed. However, these pigeons fed not on seeds handed out by children, but on corpses rotting under the elongated shadow of the Campanile.”
― Pamela Allegretto, Bridge of Sighs and Dreams

“General Grant seriously remarked to a particularly bright young woman that Venice would be a fine city if it were drained.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“When I seek another word for ‘music’, I never find any other word than ‘Venice’.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

“Mestre. Say the word without hissing the conurbated villain, and pitying its citizens. As quickly as they can, two million tourists pass through, or by, Mestre each year, and each one will be struck by the same thought as they wonder at the aesthetic opposition that it represents. Mestre is an ugly town but ugly only in the same way that Michael Jackson might be desccribed as eccentric or a Tabasco Vindaloo flambéed in rocket fuel might be described as warm. Mestre is almost excremental in its hideousness: a fetid, fly-blown, festering, industrial urbanization, scarred with varicose motorways, flyovers, rusting railway sidings and the rubbish of a billion holidaymakers gradually burning, spewing thick black clouds into the Mediterranean sky. A town with apparently no centre, a utilitarian ever-expandable wasteland adapted to house the displaced poor, the shorebound, outpriced, domicile-deprived exiles from its neighbouring city. For, just beyond the condom- and polystyrene-washed, black-stained, mud shores of Marghera, Mestre's very own oil refinery, less than a mile away across the waters of the lagoon in full sight of its own dispossessed citizens, is the Jewel of Adriatic. Close enough for all to feel the magnetism, there stands the most beautiful icon of Renaissance glory and, like so much that can attract tourism, a place too lovely to be left in the hands of its natives, the Serenissima itself, Venice.”
― Marius Brill, Making Love: A Conspiracy of the Heart

“Because, my dear Eric, I have tasted the secret knowledge. I know how much to say and when to pull back. I know what to see and not see. And now that I have become whole again, I can never go back. All these things he has given me. Better than my supposed mother and father ever could. For that, I owe him my life and allegiance.”
― Melika Dannese Lux, Corcitura

“Venice is a shindig holding on water.”
― Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

“Venice is neither a town nor a city. It is a shindig holding on water. ~Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu”
― Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

“It glides along the water looking blackly,
Just like a coffin clapt in a canoe,
Where none can make out what you say or do.”
― Lord Byron, Beppo: Uma história veneziana

“He was sure, billions of of lire in art works : The Cezanne that stood to the left of the door opposite him might be worth that just by itself.”
― Donna Leon, Brunetti's Venice: Walks with the City's Best-Loved Detective

“He slowed his pace to hers, and they walked automatically, neither of them having to hesitate about where to turn or which bridge to take: the unconscious navigation of the average Venetian is surpassed only by that of the albatross.”
― Donna Leon (author, Give Unto Others