Alessandro Baricco Quotes

“It's a strange grief ... to die of nostalgia for something you you will never live.”

— Alessandro Baricco

“This is the seashore. Neither land nor sea. It's a place that does not exist.”

— Alessandro Baricco

“I did not love you out or boredom or loneliness or caprice. I loved you because the desire for you was stronger than any happiness.”

— Alessandro Baricco

Perhaps sometimes life shows you a side of itself which leaves you with nothing more to say

— Alessandro Baricco

To die of yearning for something you will never experience

— Alessandro Baricco

“... how it would be nice if, for every sea waiting for us, there would be a river, for us.
And someone -a father, a lover, someone- able to take us by the hand and find that river -imagine it, invent it- and put us on its stream, with the lightness of one only word, goodbye. This, really, would be wonderful. It would be sweet, life, every life. And things wouldn't hurt, but they would get near taken by stream, one could first shave and then touch them and only finally be touched. Be wounded, also. Die because of them. Doesn't matter. But everything would be, finally, human. It would be enough someone's fancy -a father, a lover, someone- could invent a way, here in the middle of the silence, in this land which don't wanna talk. Clement way, and beautiful.
A way from here to the sea.”

— Alessandro Baricco

Do you have children? she asked.
No.
Why?
The man answered that one had to have faith in the world to have children.

— Alessandro Baricco

“There is nothing that can, in the dark become true”

— Alessandro Baricco

“As you see, it is not that I don't know my own mind, I know it very well but only up to a certain point in the matter. I know perfectly well what the question is. It's the answer I want.”

— Alessandro Baricco

“You were dead.'
She said.
'And in the whole world there was nothing beautiful left.”

— Alessandro Baricco

“And a while later:
'It is a strange sort of pain.'
Softly.
'To die of yearning for something you'll never experience.”

— Alessandro Baricco

“Sooner or later you'll have to tell the truth to someone.”

— Alessandro Baricco

“The last light, in the last window, went out. Only the unstoppable machine of the sea still tears away at the silence with the cyclical explosion of nocturnal waves, distant memories of sleepwalking storms and the shipwrecks of dream.”

— Alessandro Baricco

“In front of him, nothing. He had a sudden glimpse of what he had considered invisible. The end of the world.”

— Alessandro Baricco

“You're never really done for, as long as you've got a good story and someone to tell it to.”

— Alessandro Baricco

He wasn't much cut out for serious conversations. And a goodbye is a serious conversation.

— Alessandro Baricco

I often thought about him during the war; if only 1900 were here, who knows what he'd do, what he'd say. 'Fuck war' he'd say. But somehow, coming from me, it wasn't the same.

— Alessandro Baricco

“There are people who die and, with all due respect, you don't lose anything. But he was one of those that when they're gone you feel it. As if the whole world had become, from one day to the next, a little heavier.”

— Alessandro Baricco

“Every so often I wonder what on earth we are waiting for. Silence. For it to be too late, Madame.”

— Alessandro Baricco

“Only the rustle of those colours waving in the air, impenetrable, lighter than nothingness”

— Alessandro Baricco

“It was surprising to consider that in fact there were signs, that is the embers of a voice destroyed by fire.”

— Alessandro Baricco

In this transparency, the footprints of the little birds spoke with a muffled voice. What they spoke of was entirely without significance, or else something capable of lifting a life off its hinges: there was no way of knowing.

— Alessandro Baricco

There's a sense of incomprehensible apocalypse in the air-we all feel it-and there's a rumor going around: the barbarians are coming.

— Alessandro Baricco

“And carefully he brought Time to a halt, for as long as he wished.”

— Alessandro Baricco

“When loneliness mastered him he would go up to the cemetery ... The rest of his time was taken up with a liturgy of habits that succeeded in warding off sadness.”

— Alessandro Baricco

“Until the last glimmer of daylight.”

— Alessandro Baricco

Definitive resolutions are made always and only in a state of mind that is not destined to last.

— Alessandro Baricco

No, ogni uomo nobile e saggio ama la sua donna e ne ha cura come io con tutto il cuore amavo la mia, e non importava se era una schiava di guerra.
(Achille, da "Omero, Iliade")

— Alessandro Baricco

“It will not have escaped you that this town simulates normality that is completely illusory: every day something happens that one might euphemistically call irritating.”

— Alessandro Baricco

Doch es gibt Schiffe, die an absurderen Orten gestrandet sind. Ein Leben kann leicht in irgendeinem Gesicht stranden.

— Alessandro Baricco

“In the world I inhabit, there is a shortage of intellectual honesty, but not of intelligence.”

— Alessandro Baricco

“Seeing in the air things that the others did not see.”

— Alessandro Baricco

“Quel che aveva pensato Jasper Gwyn era che quella ragazza era perfetta. Aveva in mente come la bellezza irrimediabile del suo viso suggerisse un desiderio che poi il suo corpo smentiva, con fare placido e lento, perfetto. Era veleno e antidoto - lo era in modo dolce ed enigmatico. jasper Gwyn non l'aveva incontrata una sola volta senza sentire l'infantile desiderio di toccarla, appena: ma come avrebbe potuto desiderare di posare le dita su un insetto lucente, o su un vetro coperto di vapore.”

— Alessandro Baricco

“His life fell like rain before his eyes, a quiet spectacle”

— Alessandro Baricco

“Because despair was an excess that did not belong to him, he submitted to what was left of his life, and began again to look after it, with the unyielding tenacity of a gardener at work the morning after the storm.”

— Alessandro Baricco

“He fell to the ground like an olive tree, young, beautiful, strong, covered with white blossoms, suddenly shattered by a bolt of lightning in a storm.”

— Alessandro Baricco

“You can't sow without plowing first. First you have to break up the earth.”

— Alessandro Baricco

“Say the sea. Say the sea. Say the sea. So that perhaps a drop of that magic may wander through time, and something might find it, and save it before it disappears forever. Say the sea. Because it's what we have left. Because faced by the sea, we without crosses, without magic, we must still have a weapon, something, so as not to die in silence, that's all.”

— Alessandro Baricco

He was one of those men who like to be observers at their own lives ... such people observe their destiny much as most people tend to observe a rainy day.

— Alessandro Baricco

Read the flight of your arrow if you want to know your future.

— Alessandro Baricco

“As eight years before, he was leaving ... to rewrite his destiny in orderly fashion.”

— Alessandro Baricco

“She had not really a sensitive soul, but to put it in exact terms, was possessed by an uncontrollable feeling of mind”

— Alessandro Baricco

We are full of words whose true meaning we haven't been taught, and one of those words is suffering. Another is the word death. We don't know what they mean, but we use them, and this is a mystery.

— Alessandro Baricco