La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrìa Quotes

“Her gaze dims as her nostalgia for Palermo overcomes her. Those smells of seaweed dried by the sun, of capers, of ripe figs, she will never find them anywhere else; those burnt and scented shores, those waves slowly breaking, jasmine petals flaking in the sun.”
― Dacia Maraini, The Silent Duchess

“She was quite happy watching the world go by like a beautiful pageant so long as she was not asked to participate in it. She was generous and would clap her hands at other people’s achievements, but it was as if everything had already taken place a long time ago and was now merely the inevitable repetition of a familiar tale.”
― Dacia Maraini, The Silent Duchess

“She would like to be able to carry her home on her back like a snail and go off into the unknown.”
― Dacia Maraini, The Silent Duchess

“This wish to wander, to meet different kinds of people, is there something arrogant about it, something a little frivolous and perverse? Where will she go to make a home for herself when every home seems too sunk in its roots, too predictable”
― Dacia Maraini, The Silent Duchess

“It is your disability that makes you unique, deprived of the privileges that you are nevertheless entitled to through your birthright, outside the stereotypes of your social position, in spite of it being part of your very flesh.”
― Dacia Maraini, The Silent Duchess

“Is it not an aberration of the memory to love only what it has lost? Just why do we lose these things, only to languish with nostalgia for the same places and the same people that earlier bored us to extinction? Is not all this predictable, vulgar folly?”
― Dacia Maraini, The Silent Duchess

“The meal will consist of macaroni di zitu, red mullet, hare in a sour sauce, boar with chocolate, turkey stuffed with ricotta, fish cooked in wine, roast suckling pig, sweet rice, conserve of scorzonera, ice-cream, sweetmeats, almond biscuits, water ices and wines from Casa Ucrìa with the strong pungent flavour of the grapes from Torre Scannatura.”
― Dacia Maraini, The Silent Duchess

“From his ancestors he had inherited the idea that love is predatory: to take aim, to assault, to lacerate, to devour – then to go away satisfied, leaving behind a carcass, a skin, empty of life.”
― Dacia Maraini, The Silent Duchess

“To leave a book is like leaving the better part of oneself. To pass from the soft and airy arcades of the mind to the demands of a graceless body always grasping for one thing or another is in any case a surrender:”
― Dacia Maraini, The Silent Duchess

“For Duke Pietro the history of the family, however full of myth and fantasy, is more real than the tales told by the priests.”
― Dacia Maraini, The Silent Duchess

“Marianna has always suspected that her lady mother, in the far-off past, when she was very young and full of imagination, deliberately chose to become lifeless so that she would never have to die.”
― Dacia Maraini, The Silent Duchess

“Ha sempre sospettato che la signora madre, in un lontano passato in cui era giovanissima e immaginosa, ha scelto di farsi morta per non dovere morire. Da lì deve venire quella sua speciale capacità di accettare ogni noia col massimo della condiscendenza e il minimo dello sforzo.”
― Dacia Maraini, La larga vida de Marianna Ucrìa