Captain Corelli's Mandolin QUOTES

1 " The silver fish flashed in the sun like new knives, transforming their asphyxiation into a display of beauty as they flicked and leapt against each other and died. "

― , Captain Corelli's Mandolin

2 " He did not ask me to shoot him; perhaps at the very end he loved his vanishing life. "

― , Captain Corelli's Mandolin

3 " It was now possible to wake up in the morning and be amazed and grateful to be yet alive and living in a solid house, and to go to bed at night full of relief at having lived a commonplace and uneventful day. "

― , Captain Corelli's Mandolin

4 " And science is about facts, and morality is about values. They are not the same thing and they don't grow together. No one can find a value on the slide of a microscope. "

― , Captain Corelli's Mandolin

5 " Love itself is what is left over when one being in love is burned away, and this is both an art and option that accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that group of each other on the ground and when all the pretty blossoms branches. We found that we were one tree and not two. "

― , Captain Corelli's Mandolin

6 " Promise me one thing."
He nodded and she continued, "Whenever you are about to do something terrible, think of me, and then don't do it. "

― , Captain Corelli's Mandolin

7 " I am not a cynic, but I do know that history is the propaganda of the victors. "

― , Captain Corelli's Mandolin

8 " Once, near the Metsovon pass, in December, when it was twenty degrees below zero because there was no cloud, the Italians sent up a starshell. It exploded in a cascade of brilliant blue light against the face of the full moon, and the sparks drifted to earth in slow motion like the souls of reluctant angels. As that small magnesium sun hovered and blazed, the black pines stepped out of their modest shadows as though previously they had been veiled like virgins but had now decided to be seen as they are in heaven. The drifts of snow pulsed with the incandescence of the absolute chastity of ice, a mortar coughed disconsolately, and an owl whooped. For the first time in my life I shivered physically from something other than the cold; the world had sloughed away its skin and revealed itself as energy and light. "

― , Captain Corelli's Mandolin

9 " I should have brought her up stupid, " said the doctor at last. "When women acquire powers of deduction there's no knowing where trouble can end. "

― , Captain Corelli's Mandolin

10 " Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two. But sometimes the petals fall away and the roots have not entwined. "

― , Captain Corelli's Mandolin

11 " Even gold is worth less than bread "

― , Captain Corelli's Mandolin

12 " All my home is nothing but sadness and silence and ruin and memory. I have been reduced, I am my own ghost, all my beauty and youth have shrivelled away, there are no illusions of happiness to impel me. Life is a prison of poverty and aborted dreams, it is nothing but a slow progress to my place beneath the soil, it is a plot by God to disenchant us with the flesh, it is nothing but a brief flame in a bowl of oil between one darkness and another one that ends it.
I sit here and remember former times. I remember music in the night, and I know that all my joys have been pulled out of my mouth like teeth. I shall be hungry and thirsty and longing forever. If only I had a child, a child to suckle at the breast, if I had Antonio. I have been eaten up like bread. I lie down in thorns and my well is filled with stones. All my happiness was smoke. "

― , Captain Corelli's Mandolin

13 " I have a father and mother, four sisters, and three brothers, but I have not had a family since puberty. I had to live among them secretly, like one who conceals leprosy. It was not their fault that I was made into a thespian. I had to dance with girls at festal, I had to flirt with girls in the playground of the school and when taking the evening passeggiata in the piazza. I had to answer my grandmother when she asked me what kind of girl would I like to marry and whether I wanted sons or daughters. I had to listen with delight to my friends describing the intricacies of the female pudenda, I had to learn to relate fabulous histories of what I had done with girls. I learned to be more lonely than it ought to be possible to feel. "

― , Captain Corelli's Mandolin

14 " Madonna Maria, Dottore, please tell me some lies."
"I am not Pinocchio. The truth will make us free. We overcome by looking it in the eyes. "

― , Captain Corelli's Mandolin

15 " It is said that in ancient times all lands where one, and it seems that the continents themselves profess nostalgia for that state of affairs, just as there are people who say that they belong not to their nation but to the world, demanding an international passport and universal right of residence. Thus India pushes northwards, ploughing up the Himalayas, determined not to be an island but to press its tropical and humid lust on Asia. The Arabian peninsula wrecks a sly revenge on the Ottomans by leaning against Turkey casually in the hope of causing it to fall into the Black Sea. Africa, tired of white folk who think of it as musky, perilous, unknowable and romantic, squeezes northward in the determination that Europe shall look it in the face for once, and admit after all that its civilization was conceived in Egypt. Only the Americans hurry away westwards, so determined to be isolated and superior that they have forgotten that the world is round and that one day perforce they will find themselves glued prodigiously to China. "

― , Captain Corelli's Mandolin

16 " It was a question above all of personal and national honour, because the important thing was that Greece should come through this trial without the slightest imputation of turpitude. When soldiers are dead, when a country is devastated and destroyed, it is honour that survives and endures. It is honour that breathes life into the corpse when evil times have passed. "

― , Captain Corelli's Mandolin

17 " Nonetheless, I love you."
"Forever?"
"In Sicily they say that eternal love lasts for two years. Fortunately, I am not Sicilian."
"Greek men love themselves and their mothers forever. Their wives they love for six months. Fortunately I am a woman. "

― , Captain Corelli's Mandolin

18 " L'amore è una pazzia temporanea, erutta come un vulcano e poi si placa. E quando accade, bisogna prendere una decisione. Devi capire se le vostre radici si sono intrecciate a tal punto da rendere inconcepibile una separazione. Perché questo è l'amore. Non è l'ardore, l'eccitazione, le imperiture promesse di eterna passione, il desiderio di accoppiarsi in ogni minuto del giorno. Non è restare sveglia la notte a immaginare che lui baci ogni angoletto del tuo corpo. Questo è semplicemente essere 'innamorati', una cosa che sa fare qualunque sciocco. L'amore è ciò che resta quando l'innamoramento si è bruciato; ed è sia un'arte, sia un caso fortunato." pag. 288 "

― , Captain Corelli's Mandolin

19 " … she realised suddenly that there was something about music that had never been revealed to her before: it was not merely the production of sweet sound; it was, to those who understood it, an emotional and intellectual odyssey. "

― , Captain Corelli's Mandolin

20 " Socrates stared abjectly at his right foot, which it had become too much of an ordeal to move. He summoned up an effort of will which, to his consternation, moved one of his forefingers. He tried to make the effort of will to stop it, but could not make the effort of will to make the effort of will. Locked into an infinite regress of incapacity, he stood absolutely still and retreated into the kaleidoscope of unconnected images behind his eyes. One of the nuns wiped a tear from his face "

― , Captain Corelli's Mandolin