The Leopard Quotes
"To forget which book had been used was the equivalent of forgetting one’s password nowadays."
"Tancredi was still too young to aspire to any particular government office, but his energy and his fresh supply of funds made him indispensable wherever he went."
"For an author explaining the meaning of his novel to a cultured and expert Sicilian, the letter to Merlo is a laconic communication, an example of understatement raised to a model of ethical and aesthetic behavior at one and the same time."
"Do please treat it with care, for it is the only copy I possess."
"It seems to me to offer a measure of interest because it evokes a Sicilian nobleman at a moment of crisis."
"I believe the whole thing is not without its elegiac poetry."
"N.B.: the dog Bendicò is a vitally important character and practically the key to the novel."
"I have been enormously fond of you, Gioitto; I have never had a son, but I do think I could never have loved one more than I have loved you."
"It is my desire, indeed my firm wish, that my death should go unannounced either in the press or by any other means."
"We live in a changing reality to which we try to adapt ourselves like seaweed bending under the pressure of water."
"Our Lord healed the blind in body; but what will be the fate of the blind in spirit?"
"Any palliative which may give us another hundred years of life is like eternity to us."
"Above this observatory the bluster of the one and the blood on the other merge into tranquil harmony."
"The real problem is how to go on living this life of the spirit in its most sublimated moments, those moments that are most like death."
"In the estate office, the sunlight was oblique, and the pictures of his estates, now shadowed, sent no messages of reproof."
"The sun had absorbed the turbulence of men as well as the harshness of earth."
"The Prince moved toward the priest’s table, sat down, and began drawing pointed little Bourbon lilies."
"Reduced to these basic elements, its face washed clear of worries, life took on a tolerable aspect."
"That morning, shortly before reaching the top of the hill, Arguto and Teresina began the hieratic dance of dogs who have scented prey."
"The term "countryside" implies soil transformed by labor; but the scrub clinging to the slopes was still in the very same state of scented tangle."
"The dogs’ sudden pauses for thought, their tension waiting for prey, was the very same as when Artemis was invoked for the chase."
"The animal had died tortured by anxious hopes of salvation, imagining it could still escape when it was already caught, just like so many human beings."
"Life is not about waiting for the storms to pass, but about learning to dance in the rain."
"The slight breeze moved over all, universalizing the smell of dung, carrion, and sage, cancelling, suppressing, reordering each thing in its careless passage."
"But though a shot had killed the rabbit, nothing could stop the ants."
"And you, Don Ciccio, how did you vote on the twenty-first?"
"Don Fabrizio did know this; and that was why this reply merely changed a small enigma into an enigma of history."
"The day of the Plebiscite was windy and gray, and tired groups of youths had been seen going through the streets of the town."
"They had also seen two or three "foreign faces" installed in Zzu Menico’s tavern, where they were declaiming about the "magnificent and progressive future" of the new Sicily united to resurgent Italy."
"The Prince mistook for alarm what was really only surprise, and felt irritated."
"Don Fabrizio could not see what else there was to do: whether treating it as a fait accompli or as an act merely theatrical and banal, whether taking it as historical necessity or considering the trouble these humble folk might get into if their negative attitude were known."
"Like clinicians adept at treatment based on fundamentally false analyses of blood and urine which they are too lazy to rectify, the Sicilians of that time ended by killing off the patient, that is themselves, by a niggling and hair-splitting rarely grounded on any real understanding of the problems involved and even less of their interlocutors."
"We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth."
"Those were the best days in the life of Tancredi and Angelica, lives later to be so variegated, so erring, against the inevitable background of sorrow."
"Sicily wanted to sleep in spite of their invocations; for why should she listen to them if she herself is rich, if she's wise, if she's civilized, if she's honest, if she's admired and envied by all, if, in a word, she is perfect?"
"In these last six months, since your Garibaldi set foot at Marsala, too many things have been done without our being consulted for you to be able now to ask a member of the old governing class to help develop things and carry them through."
"Sleep, my dear Chevalley, sleep, that is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them, even in order to bring them the most wonderful of gifts."
"In Sicily it doesn't matter whether things are done well or done badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of 'doing' at all."
"The paradoxical result of all these separate but convergent resolutions was that at dinner in the evening the pair most in love were the calmest, reposing on their illusory good intentions for next day."
"We are old, Chevalley, very old. For more than twenty-five centuries we've been bearing the weight of a superb and heterogeneous civilization, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own."
"The only people who also despise themselves are laborers; when they've learned to jeer at others the circle will be closed and we'll have to start all over again."
"Happiness consists in seeking for an end in view rather than in attaining it."
"The Prince was grateful for the gossip; and he squeezed Tancredi’s hand with a great effort though with almost no perceptible result. He was grateful, but he did not listen."
"The silence was absolute. Under the high, high light Don Fabrizio heard no other sound than that inner one of life gushing from him."
"The Prince of Salina’s family achieved that modicum of stability that is permitted in this fluid world."
"He was making up a general balance sheet of his whole life, trying to sort out of the immense ash heap of liabilities the golden flecks of happy moments."
"The Prince foresaw an invitation soon to Margarossa, the estate which was ruining Finale by his agricultural experiments."
"To the lips of an ingenuous visitor the little room might have brought a smile, so suggestive was it of the good nature, the care of an old maid."
"The only additions being cost of powder, ridicule at useless effort, and deterioration of material."