Giorgio Bassani · 246 pages
Rating: (4.8K votes)
“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
“If, in time of peace, our museums and art galleries are important to the community, in time of war they are doubly valuable. For then, when the petty and the trivial fall way and we are face to face with final and lasting values, we… must summon to our defense all our intellectual and spiritual resources. We must guard jealously all we have inherited from a long past, all we are capable of creating in a trying present, and all we are determined to preserve in a foreseeable future. Art is the imperishable and dynamic expression of these aims. It is, and always has been, the visible evidence of the activity of free minds.…”
― Robert M. Edsel, quote from The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History
“HAMM
Open the window.
CLOV
What for?
HAMM
I want to hear the sea.
CLOV
You wouldn't hear it.
HAMM Even if you opened the window?
CLOV
No.
HAMM
Then it's not worth opening it?
CLOV
No.
HAMM(violently)
Then open it!”
― Samuel Beckett, quote from Endgame & Act Without Words
“Years later the Romantic poet John Keats would complain that on that fateful day Newton had “destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to prismatic colors.” But color—like sound and scent—is just an invention of the human mind responding to waves and particles that are moving in particular patterns through the universe—and poets should not thank nature but themselves for the beauty and the rainbows they see around them.”
― Victoria Finlay, quote from Color: A Natural History of the Palette
“Life is too bitter already, without territories and wars and noble feuds”
― T.H. White, quote from The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-5)
“He was sorry, genuinely sorry, for the pain she was in. Yet the revelation had caused certain other feelings—feelings he usually kept under tight rein, considering them both misguided and dangerous—to flex inside him, to test their strength against their restraining bonds.”
― Robert Galbraith, quote from Career of Evil
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.