“...waking at very early dawn amid all that sweat and stink, he had found himself comparing this ghastly journey with his own life, which had first moved over smiling level ground, then clambered up rocky mountains, slid over threatening passes,… — Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Copy Share Image
“Noi fummo i Gattopardi, i Leoni; quelli che ci sostituiranno saranno gli sciacalletti, le iene; e tutti quanti gattopardi, sciacalli e pecore, continueremo a crederci il sale della terra." ("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… — Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Copy Share
Love. Of course, love. Flames for a year, ashes for thirty. — Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Copy Share Image
Nowhere has truth such a short life as in Sicily; a fact has scarcely happened five minutes before its genuine kernel has vanished, been camouflaged, embellished, disfigured, squashed, annihilated by imagination and self interest; shame, fear, generosity, malice, opportunism, charity, all the passions, good as well as evil, fling themselves onto the fact and tear it to pieces; very soon… — Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Copy Share
“We’re not blind in spirit, Father. We’re just human beings in a changing world”. Il gattopardo” — Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Copy Share Image
“Don Fabrizio remembered a conversation with Father Pirrone some months before in the sunlit observatory. What the Jesuit had predicted had come to pass. But wasn’t it perhaps good tactics to insert himself into the new movement, make at least part use of it for a few members of his own class? The worry of his imminent interview with Don… — Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Copy Share
“Si queremos que todo siga como está, es preciso que todo cambie” — Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Copy Share Image
To rage and mock is gentlemanly, to grumble and whine is not. — Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Copy Share Image
“All Sicilian expression, even the most violent, is really wish fulfillment: our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering… — Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Copy Share Image
If we want everything to remain as it is, it will be necessary for everything to change. — Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Copy Share Image
“That solar hue, that variegation of gleam and shade, made Don Fabrizio's heart ache as he stood black and stiff in a doorway: this eminently patrician room reminded him of country things; the chromatic scale was the same as that of the vast wheat fields around Donnafugata, rapt, begging pity from the tyrannous sun; in this room, too, as on… — Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Copy Share
“For over twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of superb and heterogeneous civilizations, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we… — Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Copy Share Image
“E poi quando si è con Tancredi ci si può forse irritare qualche volta, ma non ci si annoia mai; e questo è molto.… — Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Copy Share Image
