Villa Coco Quotes

“Lisabetta knows the trick to life,” she said, “is knowing what you want.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Villa Coco

“She was urging me to share that, but not unprocessed, unfiltered so that it remained in its crude, original form of pain and sorrow, plunked down like a bottle of homemade wine. You must tell it again another time, she had said on our way to Ferrara. Made better, not just for the sake of the listener but for the sake of the teller. To have mastered the story. It is the work of the metallurgist to extract the gold from a clump of earth, and so it was the work of the speaker, I understood at last, to extract and refine, from the admixed events of love and life, the comedy.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Villa Coco

“It is the opposite of America: not a colonizer’s canvas cut into political states but ancient kingdoms brought together into one nation. And so the passage from Tuscany into Emilia-Romagna was not like that from South into North Carolina”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Villa Coco

“The price for seeing things as they really are. It is our youth.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Villa Coco

“I told her I had not unpacked my swim trunks, as I had just arrived.

“Oh, go without,” she said, waving away my worries. “It’s more satisfying to swim in the nude. Are you concerned about this old lady seeing something? Don’t concern yourself. I am completely blind!”

She stepped close to a painting and, with a delicate pinch of her forefinger and thumb, removed a single hair. A brisk smile at me.

She was not blind in the least.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Villa Coco

“An 'eye.' It did not mean the ability to spot the difference between a topaz and a brown diamond, a real Tiffany and a fake, or even some 'soul' in an object that all could attest to; it was to spot the echo in oneself. I scanned the room and could not sense it, but then again, this was a room filled by someone else's impulses and caprices. To find an echo in oneself, one had to know oneself. That seemed an impossibility. Would I ever become a person who bought a bridal shawl and draped it above a work by some well-known artist? Would I ever become a person who asked for a stone to be chipped off a wall?”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Villa Coco

“I was never moral, only organized.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Villa Coco

“The little Tuscan train station”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Villa Coco

“How hard to sort: what we are flattered to believe”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Villa Coco

“when of course my surprise was the classic stupidity: the thought that someone has always been the age at which we meet them. Always a silver-haired man with a smile. Time works for no one but us.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Villa Coco

“station;”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Villa Coco

“Oscar leaned over with a merry smile: “Oh”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Villa Coco

“I’m sure an elderly toad, if magically presented with his younger tadpole form, would sooner eat it up than recognize the creature as any version of himself. So it goes with time.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Villa Coco

“She was in her place in the world. And I began to think, quite suddenly, of my own. For it was as if I had delivered an important message to a remote king, who had read it and sighed his understanding, and now I would be out of the story and on my own to return from this foreign land to my home, which months or years of travel had made to me a distant place, or else continue on my journeys, somehow, in hopes of keeping in my veins this strangeness, this incongruity, which had become my ordinary life.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Villa Coco