A Thousand Days in Venice Quotes

“Living as a couple never means that each gets half. You must take turns at giving more than getting. It’s not the same as a bow to the other whether to dine out rather than in, or which one gets massaged that evening with oil of calendula; there are seasons in the life of a couple that function, I think, a little like a night watch. One stands guard, often for a long time, providing the serenity in which the other can work at something. Usually that something is sinewy and full of spines. One goes inside the dark place while the other one stays outside, holding up the moon.”
― Marlena De Blasi, A Thousand Days in Venice

“Much of my crying is for joy and wonder rather than for pain. A trumpet's wailing, a wind's warm breath, the chink of a bell on an errant lamb, the smoke from a candle just spent, first light, twilight, firelight. Everyday beauty. I cry for how life intoxicates. And maybe just a little for how swiftly it runs.”
― Marlena De Blasi, A Thousand Days in Venice

“How strange it is, sometimes, which conversations or events stays with us while so much else melts as fast as April snow.”
― Marlena De Blasi, A Thousand Days in Venice

“I don't pretend to understand these feelings, but I'm willing to let the inexplicable sit sacred.”
― Marlena De Blasi, A Thousand Days in Venice: An Unexpected Romance

“Some people ripen, some rot.”
― Marlena De Blasi, A Thousand Days in Venice

“Rather than being love-blinded, it is in love that I can see, really see.”
― Marlena De Blasi, A Thousand Days in Venice

“There isn't an agony in the world more powerful than tenderness”
― Marlena de Blasi , A Thousand Days in Venice

“Life is this conto, account,” said the banker in him. “It’s an unknown quantity of days from which one is permitted to withdraw only one precious one of them at a time. No deposits accepted.”
― de Blasi, Marlena, A Thousand Days in Venice: An Unexpected Romance

“Even in these first days together, it is very clear that this feeling of mine for the stranger has trumped all the other adventures in my life. It has shuffled everything and everyone else I thought I was moving toward or away from.”
― Marlena De Blasi, A Thousand Days in Venice

“You know I've always wanted someone to sing to me, but now I know that what I want more is to sing to you.”
― Marlena De Blasi, A Thousand Days in Venice

“Anyway nonna, grandmother, and everyone else has more sympathy for a whiff of failure than for the smell of new money.”
― Marlena de Blasi, A Thousand Days in Venice: An Unexpected Romance

“We violate the innocence of things in the name of rationality so we can wander about, uninterrupted, in our search for passion and sentiment.”
― Marlena De Blasi, A Thousand Days in Venice

“About 12 medium-to-large leeks (approximately 3 pounds), green parts trimmed off, white part split, thoroughly rinsed, and sliced thinly into rounds (or 2 pounds of onions or scallions—try a mixture of sweet onions such as Vidalia, Walla Walla, or Texas Sweet with some big, strongly flavored yellow Spanish varieties). 2 cups mascarpone 1 teaspoon just-grated nutmeg 1 teaspoon just-cracked pepper 1½ teaspoons fine sea salt ½ cup grappa or vodka ⅔ cup grated Parmesan cheese 1 tablespoon unsalted butter Place the prepped leeks into a large mixing bowl; in a smaller bowl combine all the remaining ingredients except the Parmesan and the butter, and mix well. Scrape the mascarpone mixture into the bowl with the leeks and, using two forks, evenly coat the leeks with the mixture. Spoon the leeks into a buttered oval oven dish 12 to 14 inches long, spreading the mixture evenly, or into six individual buttered oval dishes. Scatter the Parmesan over all, and bake at 400 degrees for 30 minutes or until a deep golden crust forms; 10 minutes less for smaller gratins. Yield: 6 Servings Tagliatelle con Salsa di Noci Arrostite Fresh”
― Marlena de Blasi, A Thousand Days in Venice: An Unexpected Romance

“The old man’s eyes are unpolished sapphires, and, in the haze of a thousand years of incense burned, he tells me tales of Canaletto, of Guardi and Titian and Tiepolo. He speaks of them as though they are his confidants, the fellows with whom he sups on Thursday nights. He says life is a search for beauty and that art dissolves loneliness. His and mine, I think. I am not alone. I am a wanderer in a blue felt cloche, come to Venice to stitch together her fantasies.”
― Marlena de Blasi, A Thousand Days in Venice: An Unexpected Romance

“Slowly, very slowly, I begin to feel I am at home. Sometimes I step out-of-scene for a moment, checking to see if I find some shabby sense of farce about us. Are we used people pretending to be new? No. The most stringent pulse-taking always reads negative. We are not old. We are at that lush moment just before ripeness, the moment that love suspends in a soft, sustained note of rhapsody. In the cinnamon candlelight and a lengthening tenderness, we strangers live well together in the little dacha. As a couple there is some sense about us that feels like risk, like adventure, like the tight, sharp bubbles of a good Prosecco. Even when we bewilder each other, make each other screaming crazy, there’s a bright metal ring to us like the resonance of something gold and something silver tumbling fast across wet stones. It feels as if we’re living on the eve of a rapture.”
― Marlena de Blasi, A Thousand Days in Venice: An Unexpected Romance

“Gauntlets are the stuff of every life, but when you learn, young, how to pick them up, how to work them against the demons, and, finally, how to outlast if not escape those same demons, life can seem more merciful. It’s that long, smooth, false swanning through the course of a life that seems to drive a person, sooner or later, into the wall. I never swanned through anything, but I was always grateful for the chance to keep trying to shine up things. Anyway,”
― Marlena de Blasi, A Thousand Days in Venice: An Unexpected Romance

“How I wish I could give away pieces of this day like loaves of warm bread. The”
― Marlena de Blasi, A Thousand Days in Venice: An Unexpected Romance

“Some say it rings by its own will, that if one arrives in Venice to its great, noble clanging, it is proof of one’s Venetian soul, proof the old bell remembers one from some other time.”
― Marlena De Blasi, A Thousand Days in Venice: An Unexpected Romance