Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

“Si queremos que todo siga como está, es preciso que todo cambie”

“Porque morir por alguien o por algo, está bien, entra en el orden de las cosas; pero conviene saber, o por lo menos estar seguros de que alguien sabe por quiën o por qué se muere”

“Kunigaikštis vėl susidūrė su viena Sicilijos mįsle; šioje paslapčių saloje, kur namai aklinai uždarinėti, o valstiečiai tvirtina, kad jie nežino, kaip patekti į jų kaimą, kuris matyti kalvoje, už penkių minučių kelio, - čia, šioje saloje, nors ir labai atkakliai stengiamasi parodyti, kad paslapčių labai daug, neįmanoma ką nors išlaikyti paslaptyje.”

“Cambiare tutto perché niente cambi.”

“As always the thought of his own death calmed him as much as that of others disturbed him: was it perhaps because, when all was said and done, his own death would in the first place mean that of the whole world?”

“Un hombre de cuarenta y cinco años puede creerse joven todavía hasta el momento en que se da cuenta de que tiene hijas en edad de amar. El príncipe se sintió súbitamente envejecido. Olvidó las millas que recorría cazando, los «Jesús María» que sabía provocar, la propia lozanía actual al final de un largo y penoso viaje. De pronto se vio a sí mismo como una persona canosa que acompaña un cortejo de nietos a caballo en las cabras de Villa Giulia.”

“Y mientras descendían hasta el camino habría sido difícil decir cuál de los dos eran don Quijote y quién Sancho”

“...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, to emerge eventually into a landscape of interminable undulations, all of the same color, all bare as despair. These early morning fantasies were the very worst that could happen to a man of middle age; and although the Prince knew that they would vanish with the day's activities, he suffered acutely all the same, as he was used enough to them by now to realize that deep inside him they left a sediment of grief which, accumulating day by day, would in the end be the real cause of his death.”

“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 ourselves the salt of the earth.")”

“To rage and mock is gentlemanly, to grumble and whine is not.”

“A house of which one knew every room wasn't worth living in.”

“La eternidad amorosa dura pocos años.”

“Como siempre, la consideración de su muerte lo serenaba tanto como lo turbaba la muerte de los demás. Tal vez porque, a fin de cuentas, su muerte era el final del mundo.”

“Those were the best days in the life of Tancredi and Angelica, lives later to be so variegated, so erring, against the inevitable background of sorrow. But that they did not know then; and they were pursuing a future which they deemed more concrete than it turned out to be, made of nothing but smoke and wind. When they were old and uselessly wise their thoughts would go back to those days with insistent regret; they had been days when desire was always present because it was always overcome, when many beds had been offered and refused, when the sensual urge, because restrained, had for one second been sublimated in renunciation, that is into real love.”

“Love. Of course, love. Flames for a year, ashes for thirty.”

“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

“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 could call our own. This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and even these monuments of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing round us like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn't understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind.”

“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 his estates in mid-August, the harvest had been gathered long before, stacked elsewhere, leaving, as here, a sole reminder in the color of the stubble burned and useless now. The notes of the waltz in the warm air seemed to him but a stylization of the incessant winds harping their own sorrows on the parched surfaces, today, yesterday, tomorrow, forever and forever. The crowd of dancers, among whom he could count so many near to him in blood if not in heart, began to seem unreal, made up of that material from which are woven lapsed memories, more elusive even than the stuff of disturbing dreams.”