Home > Work > The Professor and the Siren

The Professor and the Siren QUOTES

The Professor and the Siren QUOTES

1 " …They're dangerous as all gifts from the sea are; the sea offers death as well as immortality. "

― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa , The Professor and the Siren

2 " We spoke of those magic summer nights, looking out over the gulf of Castellammare, when the stars are mirrored in the sleeping sea, and how, lying on your back among the mastic trees, your spirit is lost in the whirling heavens, while the body braces itself, fearing the approach of demons. "

― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa , The Professor and the Siren

3 " He examined my few books. “Fine, fine. Perhaps you’re less ignorant than you seem. This one here,” he added as he picked up a volume of Shakespeare, “this one here understood something. ‘A sea-change into something rich and strange.’* ‘What potions have I drunk of Siren tears?’”† "

― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa , The Professor and the Siren

4 " Ovid tells us, in his Metamorphoses, that the young girls who were gathering flowers with Proserpina that fatal day were turned into the Sirens—the bird-bodied golden-feathered singers with female faces of the Homeric tradition—and then went wandering about over land and sea, crying out in search of their vanished playmate. "

― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa , The Professor and the Siren

5 " ¡Vosotros, siempre con vuestros sabores mezclados! ¡El erizo tiene que saber también a limón, el azúcar también a chocolate, el amor también a paraíso! "

― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa , The Professor and the Siren

6 " And yet they are the most beautiful thing you have down there, bloody and cartilaginous, the very image of the female sex, fragrant with salt and seaweed. Typhus, typhus! They’re dangerous as all gifts from the sea are; the sea offers death as well as immortality. In Syracuse I demanded that Orsi order them immediately. What flavor! How divine in appearance! My most beautiful memory of the last fifty years! "

― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa , The Professor and the Siren

7 " …And in truth, the sun, the seclusion, the nights passed beneath the wheeling stars, the silence, the scant nourishment, the study of remote subjects wove around me a spell that predisposed me to marvels. "

― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa , The Professor and the Siren

8 " Your sort, always combining flavors! Sea urchins have to taste also like lemon, sugar also like chocolate, love also like paradise! "

― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa , The Professor and the Siren