I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.

At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise . . . that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.

It is a well-known fact that we always recognize our homeland at the moment we are about to lose it.

In Italian museums are sometimes found little painted screens that the priest used to hold in front of the face of condemned men to hide the scaffold from them.

Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.

I felt as though I was partly unlearning what i had never learned and yet knew so well: I mean, how to live.

stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves