The Wine of Youth Quotes

“I will drink wine now, for I must prepare myself for the question which my mother will now ask. She will say: “Do you go to Mass every Sunday, my Jimmy?” I will answer: “Sometimes, Ma. Sometimes.” I will be lying. She will ask: “Do you still read books against God?” I will say, lying again: “Not any more, Ma.” And I will look at the face of my mother, and I will remember a night when we lived in the South, and I came home, and I saw my mother in tears, and sick unto death, and the doctor was called, and he saved my mother, and he came out of the room wherein my mother lay, and he held a book in his hand, and he handed it to me, and he said: “This is the cause. If you must read such stuff as this, do it where your mother can’t see you.” When I looked at the book, I saw that it was the The Anti-Christ. Now I will be home soon, and my mother will ask if I read books against God, and I will answer that I do not.”
― John Fante, The Wine of Youth: Selected Stories

“They were about the same age, but thirty-five years might have been forty-five if Mamma’s face had been a place for measuring time, while Coletta’s might have been twenty-five. You saw four children in Mamma’s face, you even saw Hugo there; you saw centuries of worry, ages of toil, aeons of work and distress. There was no record of children upon the face of Coletta Drigo, nor of worry, nor of distress; instead you saw a rare nuance of youth to maturity; you saw excitement; you saw great cities, happy times, the whole wonderful world; and, above all, her beauty, black hair, black eyes, the dark whitish skin. You were sure that if she had a pet it wasn’t a dog but a cat, a Siamese cat.”
― John Fante, The Wine of Youth: Selected Stories

“And that goes to show that when you are great, you are just great, and even when you do something bad, you are still great.”
― John Fante, The Wine of Youth: Passionate Italian-American Stories of a Father, His Sons, and God

“I would stare at that strange picture, kissing it and crying over it, happy because once it had been true.”
― John Fante, The Wine of Youth: Passionate Italian-American Stories of a Father, His Sons, and God

“La sensación de estar cometiendo un pecado estaba bien para pasar un rato, pero al final resultaba agotador.”
― John Fante, The Wine of Youth: Selected Stories