The Baron In The Trees Quotes
"I told you I don’t want it, and I don’t!" - Cosimo
"Our meals in the company of the abbé began after long prayers, with orderly, decorous, silent movements of spoons."
"The only place where we encountered the adults. For the rest of the day our mother withdrew into her rooms."
"Our father, the baron, was a dull man certainly, although not a bad one: dull because his life was dominated by thoughts that were out of step."
"I didn’t understand that my brother’s determination concealed something deeper."
"Despite all this, they were excellent parents, but so distracted that the two of us were left to grow up almost on our own."
"I’ve never fallen out of a tree in my life!" - Cosimo
"He was safe, bloodstained, with the wild beast impaled on the sword as if on a spit and one cheek torn by a triple claw."
"So I saw him arriving through the trees, all bloody down to his waistcoat, his ponytail undone under the shapeless tricorne."
"What are you doing, sir, up there? How in the world did you get mixed up with that rabble?" - Giuà della Vasca
"Who was going to care anymore about the ancient Duchy of Ombrosa?"
"He’ll have seen to getting them ready in time."
"But don’t you think it would be good to find him and give him an umbrella?"
"I invite you to come down to earth," said the baron in a peaceful, almost exhausted voice.
"I’ll come meet you, but hurry, I’m getting wet!"
"I don’t intend to obey you, Father, sir," said Cosimo.
"The most serious inconvenience of rain is muddy ground."
"A gentleman, Father, sir, is such in the trees as on the ground."
"He kept in mind the mysterious aspirated sounds and tried to repeat them."
"Ah, yes, good for you, capture Gian dei Brughi!"
"I’m sorry to tell you, Gian, Jonathan finally is hanged by the neck."
"He learned the art of pruning trees and offered his services to the cultivators of orchards in winter."
"In other words, he was able to make love for his arboreal element become, as happens with all true loves, a pitiless and painful love."
"Cosimo didn’t lose heart. To the ash where his refuge was at the time he had transported, as he always did, many things."
"He understood this: that associations make man stronger and bring out the individual’s best talents."
"Now Cosimo had an audience that listened with astonishment to everything he said."
"Cosimo, like Ottimo Massimo, was the only exemplar of a species."
"Sometimes an old man, one of those who suffer from insomnia and go willingly to the window if they hear a noise, would look out into the garden."
"The fact is that at that time it began to be habitual, and convenient, to blame him when a girl swelled up and no one knew who it had been."
"It was a summer of full moons, croaking frogs, whistling chaffinches, that summer when the baron returned and was seen again in Ombrosa."
"Cosimo spread his arms. 'I came up here before you, sirs, and I will remain after.'"
"I will go to a place where she’ll come if it’s her."
"And who were you flirting with? There. You’re jealous. Mind, I will never let you be jealous."
"The only thing to do here is try and make them prisoners!"
"I understood that I had to act on my own initiative."
"But if I’d been caught in the act my reputation as a patriot would be worthless."
"For a long time Cosimo wandered through the woods, weeping, ragged, refusing food."
"In our place they wanted to put it off. But now the grapes are ripe!"
"I am Citizen Rondò, the son of human beings, I assure you."
"They all died of hunger from the consequences of the blockade."
"It was a beautiful work, which could serve as a guide for all who govern; instead no one took it under consideration, and it remained a dead letter."
"But arms they had none, or rather one brandished the empty sheath of a dagger, another held on his shoulder a rifle barrel like a stick, carrying a bundle."
"The shadow of the Restoration weighs on Europe: all the innovators—whether Jacobins or Bonapartists—defeated; absolutism and Jesuits hold the field again."
"For me the sign that things had changed wasn’t the arrival of the Austro-Russians or the annexation of Piedmont or the new taxes or whatever, but that when I opened the window I no longer saw him balancing up there."
"So Cosimo disappeared, and didn’t even give us the satisfaction of seeing him return to earth dead."
"One would say that the trees didn’t bear up after my brother left, or that men were seized by the fury of the ax."
"Now he felt the need to be always in sight of others."
"The dying Cosimo, at the moment when the rope of the anchor passed by him, made one of those leaps that were usual with him in his youth, grabbed the rope, with his feet on the anchor and his body huddled, and so we saw him fly away, dragged in the wind, and disappear in the direction of the sea . . ."
"He lived in the trees. He always loved the earth. He ascended into the sky."
"Ombrosa is no longer there. Looking at the empty sky, I wonder if it really existed."