Italian Neighbors Quotes

“It took Descartes to deduce that God would not wish to deceive us. The world must be as it appears to be, the Frenchman deduced, because a perfect God would never wish to deceive us. Nothing has been explicable since.”
― Tim Parks, Europa

“the story, and the conviction it carries, are part of the teller’s way of organizing his own life.”
― Tim Parks, Where I'm Reading From: The Changing World of Books

“But now suddenly it occurs to me that by far the main protagonist of twentieth-century literature must be the chattering mind, which usually means the mind that can’t make up its mind, the mind postponing action in indecision and, if we’re lucky, poetry.”
― Tim Parks, Where I'm Reading From: The Changing World of Books

“In any power game, it seems, the dominant party is the least likely to be aware of what is going on.”
― Tim Parks, Where I'm Reading From: The Changing World of Books

“Now, let’s imagine that we have been condemned for life to making, year in year out a burdensome and nearly impossible decision to which the world increasingly and inexplicably ascribes a crazy importance. How do we go about it? We look for some simple, rapid, and broadly acceptable criteria that will help us get this pain out of the way. And since, as Borges himself noted, aesthetics are difficult and require a special sensibility and long reflection while political affiliations are easier and quickly grasped, we begin to identify those areas of the world that have grabbed public attention, perhaps because of political turmoil or abuses of human rights; we find those authors who have already won a huge level of respect and possibly major prizes in the literary communities of these countries and who are outspokenly committed to the right side of whatever political divide we’re talking about, and we select them.”
― Tim Parks, Where I'm Reading From: The Changing World of Books

“the city’s government seized and sold Church property until the”
― Tim Parks, Medici Money: Banking, metaphysics and art in fifteenth-century Florence

“Whenever, in a democracy, we see our rulers obsessed with “the technical aspects” of the electoral process, whenever we see them tinkering with the size of constituencies, or machinery for counting ballots, then we know we are getting close to “the secret things of our town,” the gap between respectable appearance and brutal reality.”
― Tim Parks, Medici Money: Banking, metaphysics and art in fifteenth-century Florence

“«Per così dire», iva. Mi piace questa parola, iva. Dev'essere sanscrito. Certe cose Calasso le sa. Davanti a tipi come lui che capiscono il sanscrito non puoi che restare a bocca aperta. In ogni caso, ben venga l'apologetico quando si è davanti all'approssimativo. O al titubante. O al decisamente arrischiato. Ogni traduzione dovrebbe avere iva in appendice.”
― Tim Parks, Adulterio e altri diversivi

“Quando nasce un amore non si è mai a corto di argomenti.”
― Tim Parks, Adultery and Other Diversions

“It was to be, and still is, an absolute staple of the Italian railways, whether public or private, that in some way or other, acknowledged or unacknowledged, they were/ are being paid for, or hugely subsidized, by the state, a state that was/ is itself greatly in debt.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“Once, when the minibar boy saw me promptly dump my receipt in the ashtray, he warned me that I was legally obliged to retain it for the duration of my journey, as if it was a sort of ticket without which my digestive processes might be subject to sanction.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“A big gloomy space was piled with bags, boxes, suitcases, parcels, umbrellas. There were a few shelves but no apparent order. Some of the bags seemed to have been left where they had been dropped. It was the sort of place horror-film directors dream of, or playwrights of the absurd, a place of the soul, in limbo.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“Prepare for surprises in the second part, where everything changes so that much can remain the same.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“However reluctant Italians are to embrace a multiracial society, the old antipathy to government and authority works in favor of the illegal alien.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“Government and unions have negotiated a minimum service to be maintained during strikes.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“Your ticket says via Pordenone,” he told me. “Don’t you read your documento di viaggio?” I was fascinated. What kind of man is it who imagines that when one buys a train ticket one then stops to read it?”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“We knocked lightly on the door. A voice asked who we might be, for nobody will ever open in Italy until identity is declared. Security, even in the remotest villages, is at New York standards.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Neighbors

“It was possible we looked out of sorts. And of course we were aware by now that Italians don’t drive bright orange cars (or bright yellow or green cars for that matter) and that the owners of such cars are looked upon with a certain amount of condescension and immediately understood to be Germans, an epithet more or less synonymous with bad taste.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Neighbors

“a novelist’s work is often a strategy (I don’t mean the author need be aware of this) for dealing with some personal dilemma. Not just that the dilemma is “worked out” in the narrative, as critics often tell us, but that the acts of writing and publishing and positioning oneself in the world of literature are all part of an attempt to find a solution, however provisional, to some deep personal unease.”
― Tim Parks, Where I'm Reading From: The Changing World of Books

“These trans are driven, I thought, like the mind, by electric current, and at once I was imagining all the pylons and the wires running down the valley, creating a path, a network, that was separate from the landscape so that we could pass through it at great speed, as thoughts also hurtle by so fast but are rarely in contact with reality. The mind likes to move on rails, I decided after a couple of days in Maroggia, always the same old reflections and anxieties and obsessions, one leading to the other with great predictability. The same switches, the same buffers and terminuses that you never get beyond.”
― Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

“When despair brings home the bacon and self-esteem with it, it’s hard to let it go. 'When you are suffering enough,' I suggested, 'I mean so much that it’s simply impossible to go on, then something will give and the stories will change, like it or not.”
― Tim Parks, Where I'm Reading From: The Changing World of Books

“What I’m suggesting then is that much of our response to novels may have to do with the kind of “system” or “conversation” we grew up in and within which we had to find a position and establish an identity.”
― Tim Parks, Where I'm Reading From: The Changing World of Books

“You will only have copyright in a society that places a very high value on the individual, the individual intellect, the products of individual intellect.”
― Tim Parks, Where I'm Reading From: The Changing World of Books

“I laughed and discovered something that has served me well since: the more we threaten thought and language with silence, or simply seek to demote them in our lives from the ludicrous pedestal on which our culture and background have placed them, then the more fertile, in their need to justify and assert themselves, they become. Reflection is never more exciting than when reflecting on the damage reflection does, language never more seductive than when acknowledging its unreality.”
― Tim Parks, Teach Us to Sit Still: A Sceptic's Search for Health and Healing

“Si te liberas de esa compulsión, pensó Paul de pronto, si escapas de esa necesidad de engatusar y convencer y seducir, lo que quede después serás tú, tu verdadero ser.”
― Tim Parks, Dreams of Rivers and Seas

“All writing is a sin against speechlessness,’ Beckett had said. He would have stopped, I thought, if he could.”
― Tim Parks, Teach Us to Sit Still: A Sceptic's Search for Health and Healing

“[T]hese three days of meditation have revealed to me that every thought I think is, in one way or another, an ugly, fatuous form of self-congratulation. Even what appears to be the most searing self-criticism is in fact self-congratulation. A man capable of seeing his worst side, you congratulate yourself. Coetzee is pleased to have been so hard on himself.”
― Tim Parks, Teach Us to Sit Still: A Sceptic's Search for Health and Healing

“And when Deirdre Bair went to interview Beckett for the biography the first thing he said was, ‘So you’ve come to demonstrate that it was all, after all, autobiographical.”
― Tim Parks, Teach Us to Sit Still: A Sceptic's Search for Health and Healing

“The fact is, as soon as you start with words you’re locked into a debate, forced to take a position with respect to others, confirming or rebutting what has been said before.”
― Tim Parks, Teach Us to Sit Still: A Sceptic's Search for Health and Healing