Quotes from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“You see? In the fairy tales one does as one wants, and in reality one does what one can.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“How can I explain to this woman—I thought—that from the age of six I've been a slave to letters and numbers, that my mood depends on the success of their combinations, that the joy of having done well is rare, unstable, that it lasts an hour, an afternoon, a night?”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“Leave, instead. Get away for good, far from the life we’ve lived since birth. Settle in well-organized lands where everything really is possible. I had fled, in fact. Only to discover, in the decades to come, that I had been wrong, that it was a chain with larger and larger links: the neighborhood was connected to the city, the city to Italy, Italy to Europe, Europe to the whole planet. And this is how I see it today: it’s not the neighborhood that’s sick, it’s not Naples, it’s the entire earth, it’s the universe, or universes. And shrewdness means hiding and hiding from oneself the true state of things.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.” I waited in silence”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“...maybe, in the face of abandonment, we are all the same; maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“Men, dazed by pleasure, absent-mindedly sow their seed. Overcome by their orgasm, they fertilize us. They show up inside us and withdraw, leaving, concealed in our flesh, their ghost, like a lost object.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“I said to myself that maturity consisted in accepting the turn that existence had taken without getting too upset, following a path between daily practices and theoretical achievements, learning to see oneself, know oneself, in expectation of great changes.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“maturity consisted in accepting the turn that existence had taken without getting too upset,”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“And no one knew better than I did what it meant to make your own head masculine so that it would be accepted by the culture of men; I had done it, I was doing it.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“People died of carelessness, of corruption, of abuse, and yet, in every round of voting, gave their enthusiastic approval to the politicians who made their life unbearable.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“May I point out something? You always use true and truthfully, when you speak and when you write. Or you say: unexpectedly. But when do people ever speak truthfully and when do things ever happen unexpectedly? You know better than I that it’s all a fraud and that one thing follows another and then another. I don’t do anything truthfully anymore, Lenù. And I’ve learned to pay attention to things. Only idiots believe that they happen unexpectedly.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“So afterward, when you no longer love him, it bothers you just to think that you once wanted him.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“Become. It was a verb that had always obsessed me...I wanted to become, even though I had never known what. And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“Marriage by now seemed to me an institution that, contrary to what one might think, stripped coitus of all humanity.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“She went like that saint who, although she still has her head on her shoulders, is carrying it in her hands, as if it had already been cut off.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“She was like the full moon when it crouches behind the forest and the branches scribble on its face.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“When the task we give ourselves has the urgency of passion, there's nothing that can keep us from completing it.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“Finally, I spoke of the necessity of recounting frankly every human experience, including, I said emphatically, what seems unsayable and what we do not speak of even to ourselves.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“In recent years I had begun to be interested in fashion, to educate my taste under Adele's guidance, and now I enjoyed dressing up. But sometimes - especially when I had dressed not only to make a good impression in general, but for a man - preparing myself (this was the word) seemed to me to have something ridiculous about it. All that struggle, all that time spent camouflaging myself when I could be doing something else. The colors that suited me, the ones that didn't, the styles that made me look thinner, those that made me fatter, the cut that flattered me, the one that didn't. A lengthy, costly preparation. Reducing myself to a table set for the sexual appetite of the male, to a well-cooked dish to make his mouth water.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“Maybe there’s something mistaken in this desire men have to instruct us; I was young at the time, and I didn’t realize that in his wish to transform me was the proof that he didn’t like me as I was, he wanted me to be different, or, rather, he didn’t want just a woman, he wanted the woman he imagined he himself would be if he were a woman. For Franco, I said, I was an opportunity for him to expand into the feminine, to take possession of it: I constituted the proof of his omnipotence, the demonstration that he knew how to be not only a man in the right way but also a woman. And today when he no longer senses me as part of himself, he feels betrayed. I”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“Nelle favole si fa come si vuole e nella realtà si fa come si può.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“Whenever I returned I found a city that was spineless, that couldn’t stand up to changes of season, heat, cold, and, especially, storms. Look how the station on Piazza Garibaldi was flooded, look how the Galleria opposite the museum had collapsed; there was a landslide, and the electricity didn’t come back on. Lodged in my memory were dark streets full of dangers, unregulated traffic, broken pavements, giant puddles. The clogged sewers splattered, dribbled over. Lavas of water and sewage and garbage and bacteria spilled into the sea from the hills that were burdened with new, fragile structures, or eroded the world from below. People died of carelessness, of corruption, of abuse, and yet, in every round of voting, gave their enthusiastic approval to the politicians who made their life unbearable.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“I feel like the knight in an ancient romance as, wrapped in his shining armor, after performing a thousand astonishing feats throughout the world, he meets a ragged, starving herdsman, who, never leaving his pasture, subdues and controls horrible beasts with his bare hands, and with prodigious courage.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“Forse dovresti imparare a capire chi sono gli amici e chi i nemici.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.” I”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“I devoted myself to the house, to the children, to Pietro. Not once did I think of having Clelia back or of replacing her with someone else. Again, I took on everything, and certainly I did it to put myself in a stupor. But it happened without effort, without bitterness, as if I had suddenly discovered that this was the right way of spending one's life, and a part of me whispered: Enough of those silly notions in your head.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“I now knew a method of speaking and writing that—by means of a refined vocabulary, stately and thoughtful pacing, a determined arrangement of arguments, and a formal orderliness that wasn’t supposed to fail—sought to annihilate the interlocutor to the point where he lost the will to object.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“those who gave me the most pleasure. You know why? Because you’re an idiot, and even to fuck well it takes a little intelligence. For example you don’t know how to give a blow job, you’re hopeless, and it’s pointless to explain it to you, you can’t do it, it’s too obvious that it disgusts you. And he went on like that for a while, making speeches that became increasingly crude; with him vulgarity was normal. Then he wanted to explain clearly how things stood: he was marrying her because of the respect he felt for her father, a skilled pastry maker he was fond of; he was marrying her because one had to have a wife and even children and even an official house. But there should be no mistake: she was nothing to him, he hadn’t put her on a pedestal, she wasn’t the one he loved best, so she had better not be a pain in the ass, believing she had some rights. Brutal words. At a certain point Michele himself must have realized it, and he became gripped by a kind of melancholy. He had murmured that women for him were all games with a few holes for playing in. All. All except one. Lina was the only woman in the world he loved—love, yes, as in the films—and respected. He told me, Gigliola sobbed, that she would have known how to furnish this house. He told me that giving her money to spend, yes, that would be a pleasure. He told me that with her he could have become truly important, in Naples. He said to me: You remember what she did with the wedding photo, you remember how she fixed up the shop? And you, and Pinuccia, and all the others, what the fuck are you, what the fuck do you know how to do? He had said those things to her and not only those. He had told her that he thought about Lila night and day, but not with normal desire, his desire for her didn’t resemble what he knew. In reality he didn’t want her. That is, he didn’t want her the way he generally wanted women, to feel them under him, to turn them over, turn them again, open them up, break them, step on them, and crush them. He didn’t want her in order to have sex and then forget her. He wanted the subtlety of her mind with all its ideas. He wanted her imagination. And he wanted her without ruining her, to make her last. He wanted her not to screw her—that word applied to Lila disturbed him. He wanted to kiss her and caress her. He wanted to be caressed, helped, guided, commanded. He wanted to see how she changed with the passage of time, how she aged. He wanted to talk with her and be helped to talk. You understand? He spoke of her in way that to me, to me—when we are about to get married—he has never spoken.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“And the plane began it's takeoff. How exciting it was to lift off from the ground with a jerk and see the houses that became parallelepipettes and the streets that changed into strips and the countryside that was reduced to a green patch and the sea that inclined like a compact paving stone and the clouds that fell below in a landslide of soft rocks and the anguish, the pain, the very happiness that became a part of a unique luminous motion. It seemed to me that flying subjected everything to a process of simplification and I sighed, I tried to lose myself. Every so often I asked Nino "are you happy?" and he nodded yes, kissed me. At times I had the impression that the floor under my feet, the only surface I could count on, was trembling.”
― quote from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

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