Marlena De Blasi Quotes

“Living as a couple never means that each gets half. You must take turns at giving more than getting. It's not the same as a bow to the other whether to dine out rather than in, or which one gets massaged that evening with oil of calendula; there are seasons in the life of a couple that function, I think, a little like a night watch. One stands guard, often for a long time, providing the serenity in which the other can work at something. Usually that something is sinewy and full of spines. One goes inside the dark place while the other one stays outside, holding up the moon.”

— Marlena De Blasi

“Much of my crying is for joy and wonder rather than for pain. A trumpet's wailing, a wind's warm breath, the chink of a bell on an errant lamb, the smoke from a candle just spent, first light, twilight, firelight. Everyday beauty. I cry for how life intoxicates. And maybe just a little for how swiftly it runs.”

— Marlena De Blasi

“I don't pretend to understand these feelings, but I'm willing to let the inexplicable sit sacred.”

— Marlena De Blasi

Some people are born empty. All manner of good deeds and patience and loving kindness can't even begin to fill them up.

— Marlena De Blasi

“How strange it is, sometimes, which conversations or events stays with us while so much else melts as fast as April snow.”

— Marlena De Blasi

“Maybe the only thing that matters is to make our lives last as long as we do. You know, to make a life last until it ends, to make all the parts come out even, like when you rub the last piece of bread in the last drop of oil on your plate and eat it with the last sip of wine in your glass.”

— Marlena De Blasi

They all know the truth, that there are only three subjects worth talking about. At least here in these parts," he says, "The weather, which, as they're farmers, affects everything else. Dying and birthing, of both people and animals. And what we eat - this last item comprising what we ate the day before and what we're planning to eat tomorrow. And all three of these major subjects encompass, in one way or another, philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, the physical sciences, history, art, literature, and religion. We get around to sparring about all that counts in life but we usually do it while we're talking about food, it being a subject inseparable from every other subject. It's the table and the bed that count in life. And everything else we do, we do so we can get back to the table, back to the bed.

— Marlena De Blasi

Some people ripen, some rot.

— Marlena De Blasi

“Rather than being love-blinded, it is in love that I can see, really see.”

— Marlena De Blasi

“She's a woman. Like a chameleon does, a woman quietly blends into all the parts of her life. Sometimes you can hardly tell she's there, she's so quiet going on about her business. Feed the baby. Muck the stables. Make soup from stones. Make a sheet into a dress. She doesn't count on destiny for anything. She knows its her own hands, her own arms, her own thighs and breasts that have to do the work. Destiny is bigger in men's lives. Destiny is a welcome guest in a man's house. She barely knocks and he's there to open the door. "Yes, yes. You do it," he says to destiny and lumbers back to his chair.”

— Marlena De Blasi

“I run down to meet Floriana who is breathless from her hike. She stops in the road, the last light at her back. Prickles of rain cling to her unkerchiefed, loosened hair, capturing in her the flickering russet frame of it. Topaz almonds are her eyes, lit tonight from some new, old place, from some exquisitely secret oubliette, which she must often forget she possesses. We talk for a minute and Barlozzo passes us by like a boy too shy to speak to two girls at once.”

— Marlena De Blasi

“There isn't an agony in the world more powerful than tenderness”

— Marlena De Blasi

“You know I've always wanted someone to sing to me, but now I know that what I want more is to sing to you.”

— Marlena De Blasi

“Everything about this evening is both exquisite and bewildering and I can't decide if I want to go on with this dream or run back down the yellow-lit rock to the stable. But the stable door is closed.”

— Marlena De Blasi

“Life is this conto, account," said the banker in him. "It's an unknown quantity of days from which one is permitted to withdraw only one precious one of them at a time. No deposits accepted.”

— Marlena De Blasi

“It was Don Paolo's birthday and all the people of the village were gathered in the piazza to celebrate him. The band played, the wine flowed, the children danced, and, as he stood for a moment alone under the pergola, a little girl approached the the beloved priest. "But Don Paolo, are you not happy?" she asked him. "Of course I am happy," he assured the little girl. "Why, then, aren't you crying?”

— Marlena De Blasi

“You will sustain your rage, using time as a defense against fear and indolence. In the great stash of defenses, time is the one least imaginative.”

— Marlena De Blasi

“We're all who we are endlessly.”

— Marlena De Blasi

You rob time, Fernando. How arrogant you are, taking an evening like this one as though it were some sour cherry, spitting half its flesh into the dirt. Every time you pitch yourself back into the past, you lose time. Have you so much of it to spare, my love?

— Marlena De Blasi

“Even in these first days together, it is very clear that this feeling of mine for the stranger has trumped all the other adventures in my life. It has shuffled everything and everyone else I thought I was moving toward or away from.”

— Marlena De Blasi

We violate the innocence of things in the name of rationality so we can wander about, uninterrupted, in our search for passion and sentiment.

— Marlena De Blasi

Some say it rings by its own will, that if one arrives in Venice to its great, noble clanging, it is proof of one's Venetian soul, proof the old bell remembers one from some other time.

— Marlena De Blasi

“We believed the fairy tales we told our children and we loved them beyond reason even when we were green and bungling about it. We were children loving our children. And that's who we are still.”

— Marlena De Blasi

“Most crimes are connected to hunger. One hunger or another.”

— Marlena De Blasi

“Sicily could only be an island, less by the caprice of nature than by her own insolence. As though she might have quit Italy had she not already been born separate from it.”

— Marlena De Blasi

“Our babies cried when we left them and we cry when they leave us. Echoes. Proud almost to arrogance then, we pushed them about in their carriages. Dutifully, wearily now they push us about in our chairs.”

— Marlena De Blasi

Take my hand and grow young with me. Don't rush. Don't sleep. Be a beginner. Light the candles. Keep the fire. Dare to love someone. Tell yourself the truth. Stay inside the rapture.

— Marlena De Blasi

Gauntlets are the stuff of every life, but when you learn young how to pick them up, how to work them against the demons, and finally how to outlast if not escape those same demons, life can seem more merciful. It's that long, smooth, false swanning through life that seems to drive a person, sooner or later, into the wall.

— Marlena De Blasi

“We accumulate pain, collect it ... We display it, stack it up into a pile, then we stack it up into a mountain, so we can climb up onto it, waiting for or demanding sympathy: "Hey, do you see how big my pain is?"”

— Marlena De Blasi