Quotes
List here any quote, from Leonardo Sciascia's book To Each His Own.
Quotes that inspire you, or give you a strong visual image, or maybe you just admire the author's use of words . . . poetic, lyrical, straightforward, cultural, etc . . .
We are reading To Each His Own in celebration of Leonardo Sciascia's birthday: January 18, 1921 " The truth is at the bottom of a well. You look in a well, and you see the sun or the moon, but if you jump in, there's no longer the sun or the moon; there's the truth." Leonardo Sciascia Documentary which profiles a new wave of Italian crime fiction that has emerged to challenge the conventions of the detective novel. There are no happy endings in these noir tales, only revelations about Italy's dark heart - a world of corruption, unsolved murders and the mafia. Italian version of To Each His Own - come see the English version on January 8, 2022 A Ciascuno il Suo - Full Movie English subtitles https://www.britannica.com/video/183275/Todomodo-study-work-Leonardo-Sciascia-life
In an interview Laurana conducts with Dr. Roscio’s aged father the old rationalist make the distinction between Sicily and “the North.” A northerner who hears the proverb “The dead are dead; help the living” imagines an accident that leaves one man dead and another injured so you let the dead man be and help the survivor. A Sicilian hearing the same proverb imagines instead the murderer and his victim, and if the victim is your own flesh and blood you help the living man by speeding his way to hell.
ReplyDeleteA man who is capable of killing a dog in cold blood will be capable of killing a Christian as easily as he’d recite the Lord’s Prayer.
ReplyDeleteThe man who holds the whip makes the rules.
ReplyDeleteOne corollary of all the detective novels to which a goodly share of mankind repairs for refreshment specifies that a crime present it’s investigators with a picture, the material and, so to speak, stylistic elements of which, if meticulously assembled and analyzed, permit a sure solution.
ReplyDeleteI read once in some book or other on philosophy— a discussion of relativism it was— that the fact that we, with the naked eye, do not see the feet of the worms in the cheese is no reason to believe that the worms do not see them . . . I am a worm in the same cheese and I see the other worms’ feet.
ReplyDelete. . . the dog sniffing the tracks of the porcupine feels the sting of the quills even before he sights him, and howls mournfully.
ReplyDeleteThere are, as everyone knows, cases in which innocent people behave as if they were guilty and are thereby lost; for that matter, under the eye of the local policeman, the customs officer, the carabiniere, or the judge, all Italians begin to act guilty. But he, Laurana, was far from the reaches of the law, far from those invested with the authority of the law —farther from them than Mars is distant from Earth; he viewed policemen and judges through the lens of fantasy as Martians who now and then materialized in human grief, in madness.
ReplyDeleteYet everyone knows that a tardiness of fifteen minutes to a half hour is part of a woman’s normal concept of time . . .
ReplyDeleteSeptember 8th. In town, The feast of Mary the Child: The effigy of an infant swabbed in gold cloth and pearls and carried in procession; fireworks and band music, to which the very walls vibrated like the diapason; the first hog-butchering and the final inundation of water ices of the season . . .
ReplyDelete