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Italian Neighbors QUOTES

Italian Neighbors QUOTES

1 " What I’m suggesting then is that much of our response to novels may have to do with the kind of “system” or “conversation” we grew up in and within which we had to find a position and establish an identity. "

― Tim Parks , Italian Neighbors

2 " In any power game, it seems, the dominant party is the least likely to be aware of what is going on. "

― Tim Parks , Italian Neighbors

3 " And when Deirdre Bair went to interview Beckett for the biography the first thing he said was, ‘So you’ve come to demonstrate that it was all, after all, autobiographical. "

― Tim Parks , Italian Neighbors

4 " Now, let’s imagine that we have been condemned for life to making, year in year out a burdensome and nearly impossible decision to which the world increasingly and inexplicably ascribes a crazy importance. How do we go about it? We look for some simple, rapid, and broadly acceptable criteria that will help us get this pain out of the way. And since, as Borges himself noted, aesthetics are difficult and require a special sensibility and long reflection while political affiliations are easier and quickly grasped, we begin to identify those areas of the world that have grabbed public attention, perhaps because of political turmoil or abuses of human rights; we find those authors who have already won a huge level of respect and possibly major prizes in the literary communities of these countries and who are outspokenly committed to the right side of whatever political divide we’re talking about, and we select them. "

― Tim Parks , Italian Neighbors

5 " It took Descartes to deduce that God would not wish to deceive us. The world must be as it appears to be, the Frenchman deduced, because a perfect God would never wish to deceive us. Nothing has been explicable since. "

― Tim Parks , Italian Neighbors

6 " the story, and the conviction it carries, are part of the teller’s way of organizing his own life. "

― Tim Parks , Italian Neighbors

7 " But now suddenly it occurs to me that by far the main protagonist of twentieth-century literature must be the chattering mind, which usually means the mind that can’t make up its mind, the mind postponing action in indecision and, if we’re lucky, poetry. "

― Tim Parks , Italian Neighbors

8 " the city’s government seized and sold Church property until the "

― Tim Parks , Italian Neighbors

9 " We knocked lightly on the door. A voice asked who we might be, for nobody will ever open in Italy until identity is declared. Security, even in the remotest villages, is at New York standards. "

― Tim Parks , Italian Neighbors

10 " You will only have copyright in a society that places a very high value on the individual, the individual intellect, the products of individual intellect. "

― Tim Parks , Italian Neighbors

11 " Quando nasce un amore non si è mai a corto di argomenti. "

― Tim Parks , Italian Neighbors

12 " Whenever, in a democracy, we see our rulers obsessed with “the technical aspects” of the electoral process, whenever we see them tinkering with the size of constituencies, or machinery for counting ballots, then we know we are getting close to “the secret things of our town,” the gap between respectable appearance and brutal reality. "

― Tim Parks , Italian Neighbors

13 " «Per così dire», iva. Mi piace questa parola, iva. Dev'essere sanscrito. Certe cose Calasso le sa. Davanti a tipi come lui che capiscono il sanscrito non puoi che restare a bocca aperta. In ogni caso, ben venga l'apologetico quando si è davanti all'approssimativo. O al titubante. O al decisamente arrischiato. Ogni traduzione dovrebbe avere iva in appendice. "

― Tim Parks , Italian Neighbors

14 " These trans are driven, I thought, like the mind, by electric current, and at once I was imagining all the pylons and the wires running down the valley, creating a path, a network, that was separate from the landscape so that we could pass through it at great speed, as thoughts also hurtle by so fast but are rarely in contact with reality. The mind likes to move on rails, I decided after a couple of days in Maroggia, always the same old reflections and anxieties and obsessions, one leading to the other with great predictability. The same switches, the same buffers and terminuses that you never get beyond. "

― Tim Parks , Italian Neighbors

15 " Your ticket says via Pordenone,” he told me. “Don’t you read your documento di viaggio?” I was fascinated. What kind of man is it who imagines that when one buys a train ticket one then stops to read it? "

― Tim Parks , Italian Neighbors

16 " There are people who want to be on their own, to mark out their own territory and be quiet there, and there are people who are eager to invade that territory, to sit close to someone else. "

― Tim Parks , Italian Neighbors

17 " Once, when the minibar boy saw me promptly dump my receipt in the ashtray, he warned me that I was legally obliged to retain it for the duration of my journey, as if it was a sort of ticket without which my digestive processes might be subject to sanction. "

― Tim Parks , Italian Neighbors

18 " In every aspect of Italian life, one of the key characteristics to get to grips with is that this is a nation at ease with the distance between ideal and real. They are beyond what we call hypocrisy. Quite simply they do not register the contradiction between rhetoric and behavior. It’s an enviable mind-set. "

― Tim Parks , Italian Neighbors

19 " So we had the classic Italian compromise, a theater of strife when all was actually agreed. Anarchy is rare in Italy, but legality is always up for renegotiation, especially if you can present yourself as hard done by, "

― Tim Parks , Italian Neighbors

20 " I laughed and discovered something that has served me well since: the more we threaten thought and language with silence, or simply seek to demote them in our lives from the ludicrous pedestal on which our culture and background have placed them, then the more fertile, in their need to justify and assert themselves, they become. Reflection is never more exciting than when reflecting on the damage reflection does, language never more seductive than when acknowledging its unreality. "

― Tim Parks , Italian Neighbors