Giorgio Bassani · 246 pages
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“In life, if one wants seriously to understand how the world works, he must die at least once.”
― Giorgio Bassani, quote from The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
“Even in a city as small as Ferrara, you can manage, if you like, to disappear for years and years, one from another, living side by side like the dead”
― Giorgio Bassani, quote from The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
“How many years have passed since that far-off June afternoon? More than thirty. And yet, if I close my eyes, Micòl Finzi-Contini is still there, leaning over her garden wall, looking at me and talking to me. In 1929 Micòl was little more than a child, a thin, blond thirteen-year old with large, clear, magnetic eyes. And I was a boy in short trousers, very bourgeois and very vain, whom a small academic setback was sufficient to cast down into the most childish desperation. We both fixed our eyes on each other. Above her head the sky was a compact blue, a warm already summer sky without the slightest cloud. Nothing, it seemed, would be able to alter it, and nothing indeed has altered it, at least in memory.”
― Giorgio Bassani, quote from The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
“ 'You said we were exactly alike,' I spoke again. 'In what way?'
But yes, yes we are — she exclaimed —in the way, like you, I've no access to that instinctive enjoyment of things that's typical of normal people. She could sense it very clearly: for me, no less than for her, the past counted far more than the present, remembering something far more than possessing it. Compared to memory, every possession can only ever seem disappointing, banal, inadequate...She understood me so well! My anxiety that the present 'immediately' turned into the past so that I could love it and dream about it at leisure was just like hers, was identical. It was 'our' vice, this: to go forwards with our heads forever turned back.”
― Giorgio Bassani, quote from The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
“Tenendosi a braccetto, alcune ragazze formavano a volte delle catene tutte femminili di cinque o sei. Strane, mi dicevo, guardandole. Nell'attimo che le incrociavamo, scrutavano attraverso i cristalli coi loro occhi ridenti, nei quali la curiosità si mescolava a una specie di bizzarro orgoglio, di disprezzo appena simulato. Davvero strane. Belle e Libere.”
― Giorgio Bassani, quote from The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
“If only I'd done it then, when I should have, everything would have been easy. What a joke.”
― Giorgio Bassani, quote from The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
“ That night I spent in turmoil. Fitfully, I slept, I woke up, I slept again, and every time I slept I kept on dreaming of Micòl.
I dreamt, for example, of finding myself, just like that very first day I set foot in the garden, watching her play tennis with Alberto. Even in the dream I never took my eyes off her for a second. I kept on telling myself how wonderful she was, flushed and covered with sweat, with that frown of almost fierce concentration that divided her forehead, all tensed up as she was with the effort to beat her smiling, slightly bored and sluggish older brother. Yet then I felt oppressed by an uneasiness, an embittered feeling, an almost unbearable ache.”
― Giorgio Bassani, quote from The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
“One of the most odious forms of anti-Semitism was precisely this: to complain that Jews aren't sufficiently like other people, and then, the opposite, once they've become almost totally assimilated with their surroundings, to complain that they're just like everybody else, not even a fraction distinguished from the average.”
― Giorgio Bassani, quote from The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
“She just kept on criticizing me, but for contradictory reasons.”
― Giorgio Bassani, quote from The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Giorgio Bassani
Born place: in Bologna, Italy
Born date March 4, 1916
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“He had awoken too late for happiness, but not for strength, and could feel an austere joy, as of a warrior who is homeless but stands fully armed.”
― E.M. Forster, quote from Maurice
“For what can be imagined more beautiful than the sight of a perfectly just city rejoicing in justice alone.”
― Mark Helprin, quote from Winter's Tale
“I don't know what that means. To truly live."
"To find work that you love, and work harder than other men. To learn the languages of the earth, and love the sounds of the words and the things they describe. To love food and music and drink. Fully love them. To love weather, and storms, and the smell of rain. To love heat. To love cold. To love sleep and dreams. To love the newness of each day.”
― Pete Hamill, quote from Forever
“At the entrance of this street, a Janissary was pinned to a wooden door by an eight-foot-long spear, which Jack looked on as proving that Yevgeny had passed by there recently.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from The Confusion
“One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some particular way -- said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but it could never be true to say of one man that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid. Yet we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong. Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from Resurrection
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