The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna Quotes

“it is the moral responsibility of the incompetent to identify their own weaknesses and not accept positions of power.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“Modernity has stripped some of the magic out of the ways we live, and die”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“She was not the best cook, so she did not cook at all—it was important to know your limitations and not waste time attempting to do poorly what you could have someone else do for you.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“Most recently, these people have been emigrants trying to get into Italy, not emigrants trying to leave, and their passage is no easier or safer than that of their antecedents. Thousands of refugees from Syria, Libya, Eritrea, Somalia, Ghana, and Nigeria have died off the coasts of Italy in the last ten years, capsized, drowned, sunk in flames. History marches on, and names and destinations change, but not the injustices we let one another suffer.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“You probably don't come to visit as often as you should, and when you do come to visit, it is offensive to Auntie Tina how little you'll eat. All this seems like an Italian grandmother joke, but I assure you Tina Caramanico is quite serious. There are two ways to handle this overfeeding situation. You can yell at her to stop putting food on your plate, then feel guilty about yelling at an old woman. Or you can avoid conflict, eat quietly, and suffer only physically afterward. The first time I brought my husband to meet her, Auntie Tina told me admiringly, “He eats so nicely.” This is a thing Italian grandmothers say about men who don’t yell at them during dinner.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“Lived-life stories end in decrepitude, resentments, and squandered opportunities; in crumbling faculties, unrecoupable disappointments, in loneliness.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“This was the trouble with emigration—it dismantled the patriarchy. Because really, what did Assunta, or any woman, need a husband for, when she did every goddamn thing herself?”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“For those who might make the argument that Cadorna was incompetent, not evil, I will offer my opinion that it is the moral responsibility of the incompetent to identify their own weaknesses and not accept positions of power.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“It’s the best legend, though, and sometimes a good legend is truer than the truth.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“The mal’oicch’, as it’s called in Calabrese, the Evil Eye, is the bad atmosphere generated by suppressed resentments, jealousy with the power to wound, ruin, craze, or even kill. The mal’oicch’ is particularly dangerous for blessed or beautiful or wealthy people, who often seem to have the best and worst luck because of all the accumulated jealousy, invidia, around them.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“You step on a boat knowing it is forever, one way or another. But understanding what forever means—that is something your heart tries to protect you from.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“Be tikėjimo stebuklų nebūna, tik sutapimai.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“was important to know your limitations and not waste time attempting to do poorly what you could have someone else do for you.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“History marches on, and names and destinations change, but not the injustices we let one another suffer.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“This was the trouble with emigration - it dismantled the patriarchy. Because really, what did Assunta, or any woman, need a husband for, when she did every goddamn thing herself?”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“Without faith there are no miracles, just coincidences.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“Modernity has stripped some of the magic out of the ways we live and die.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“She was no one to the world—she wasn't pretty, she was old, she wasn't such a good mother—but she was everything *she* needed. She could work, and she could fight. She has survived all of everything. She had survived.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“It was nice to think the beautiful things in the photos were their cultural legacy as Italians, even if Hartford had more in common with Ievoli than did the Venetian lagoon.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“All the people who had nagged and pressured her for the last four years were suddenly kind and caring. They threw her parties and bought her gifts. They were genuinely happy for her, now that she was falling into line.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“Stella liked power, and her charisma was one of the greatest powers available to her, one of the few powers a young woman in southern Italy could possible wield in these years between the wars.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“Stella was effortlessly provocative and categorically unaccommodating.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“Across the street from Tina's little white ranch house, not forty yards away, Stella sits in an armchair by the picture window in her own little white ranch house. The arrangement is idea for the estranged sisters to spy on each other, watching each other's driveways to tally up which relative is coming to visit whom.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“Family memory is a tricky thing; we repeat some stories to ourselves until we are bored of them, while others inexplicably fall away. Or maybe not inexplicably; maybe some stories, if remembered, would fit too uncomfortably into the present family narrative. One generation resists them, and then the generation that follows never knew them, and then they are gone, overwritten by the gentler sound bites.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“In either case, it is rather a lot of adventure to pack into a single life story, but the Calabrese are a tough people. It is what we are known for, being stubborn beyond any reason and without any care for self or well-being. For so many centuries of our history we had so little we were able to fight for that this instinct is irrepressible: when we have set our mind on something, the force of our will is greater than the threat of disorder, disgrace, or death. What Stella Fortuna fought for so stubbornly seven (or eight) different times. I wish I could say no one ever faulted her for that.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“They were, as mentioned, women of total faith who trusted wholly in the saving grace of Jesus, but from a practical standpoint it never hurt to back up His good efforts with a little mountain witchcraft.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“Not even the smallest difference," she repeated, because we Italians say things many times and with many words.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“But what if we said that the power of human faith is in making things real even when they are not—that by giving imaginary entities our credence we allow them to assume power over us—to step into being? Because what is faith but a willingness to believe?”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“This was the trouble with emigration—it dismantled the patriarchy.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

“It's like the Americans say. They stole their bed, now they can lie in it.”
― Juliet Grames, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna