Italian Literature Quotes

For whence did Dante take the materials for his hell but from this our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell of it.

The best novelist of my generation is an Italian living in Paris, still working and improving - Italo Calvino.

Dante Alighieri was not only a Christian poet or a priest, he was a man. He was a real poet. We can understand that the goal of Divine Comedy is beauty. You don't need also to understand Italian or to know Italian, because when Dante's writing, when we recite Dante out loud, it explodes a cosmos of illumination like to recite music, a symphony.

All right, then, I'll say it: Dante makes me sick.

In England Giordano Bruno had given lectures on the plurality of worlds, and in that country had written, in Italian, his most important works. It added not a little to the exasperation against him, that he was perpetually declaiming against the insincerity, the impostures, of his persecutors - that wherever he went he found skepticism varnished over and concealed by hypocrisy; and that it was not against the belief of men, but against their pretended belief, that he was fighting; that he was struggling with an orthodoxy that had neither morality nor faith.

There is a place in Hell called the Malebolge.

The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that influence as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmosphere were as yet unfavourable for its growth.

'The Dante Club' was one of America's most important book clubs, as their Wednesday night meetings ultimately led to our country's first exposure to Dante's poetry on a wide scale.

One of my desert island books, 'The Leopard' is not so much a novel as a eulogy for a way of life and a Sicily that was already lost by the time Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was writing.

There is nothing more beautiful in the world, enough to lose one's head. A sunset with a long nose, a starry sky that lies, a river searching for its father, a beautiful blue forest. It makes you laugh, it makes you cry, it's very mean, generous, magical, universal, a picture of freedom, of unrestrained desire to live, of pain and joy - a joy so powerful and sweet that it restores the souls in every spot on earth. The story of Pinocchio - nothing more beautiful in the world.

I believe in the future a new Dante will write a new Divine Comedy.

Although I studied Dante's Inferno as a student, it wasn't until recently, while researching in Florence, that I came to appreciate the enduring influence of Dante's work on the modern world.

I wish more Italian literature were translated and read in English. I've discovered so many extraordinary and diverse writers: Lalla Romano, Carlo Cassola. Beppe Fenoglio, Giorgio Manganelli, just to name a few.

'The Divine Comedy' is very sophisticated but also very popular.

I love the Italian culture - it's a beautiful culture. I love the language, the Italian people, their music, their attitudes... I just love it! Sometimes I think I'm an Italian trapped in a Spanish woman's body.

Dante Alighieri has the most glorious imagination of modern poetry. So it's talking about us, it's concerning us. Everything in it conveys sentiment, emotions. He is really the greatest poet ever. So I am really very proud to present the shining pearl of Italian culture around the world.

I studied literature and Italian at Yale. I wrote my thesis about Italo Svevo, one of my heroes.

I lived in Italy for quite a while and married an Italian woman. While there, I immersed myself in the complete culture: the music, art, literature, film, food, and history. It's easy to fall in love with. As a country, Italy does a good job of holding onto its rich traditions and culture. There's a real lack of embracing history in America.

Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries.

I tend to read mostly 20th-century fiction, 20th-, 21st-century fiction in Italian.

What I started to read and most enjoyed while I was a student was an Italian edition of 'Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.'

Six Characters in Search of an Author.

In the literature of France Moliere occupies the same kind of position as Cervantes in that of Spain, Dante in that of Italy, and Shakespeare in that of England. His glory is more than national - it is universal.