Quotes from Francesca Marciano

It's not easy to give up something you've had all your life.

Whenever she walked along the streets of Manhattan, she looked at all the different faces coming toward her and, despite their different features and colors, she regarded them all as Americans.

Suddenly it all seemed luminously clear. Love had very little to do with fear and emotional sabotage; love had to do with trust.

The nature of anything truly enchanting has to be as light as a whiff of air.

Inutile piangere sul latte versato. (No use crying over spilled milk.)

Love sometimes makes people ruthless in a way that not even hatred can.

Jealousy is a disease, it's like a poison.

I think part of me doesn't want to remember him, for fear of missing him too much.

Maybe that's what happens with age, I thought. All your life you force yourself to forget people who have hurt you, but as you get older and weaker their memory surfaces again, like a bubble in the water. You have to surrender, because you feel to tired to fight it and push it down again. And maybe, unexpectedly, you find out that instead, of revamping your anger, those memories produce an unexpected sweetness.

You'll understand me when you're older. Then you'll see how men can blind you. And I mean blind you. To the point that you're no longer yourself.

I can't say why some memories float and other sink.

You know, when you're unhappy you don't have the strength left to take care of others. But it doesn't mean you don't love them.

A first kiss is the demarcation line: the same information that a moment ago felt private, all of a suddens seems unfair to withhold. And with that exchange came more.

We knew nothing of loss. Nobody has taught us about pain. Until that moment, death had just amounted to a scary sound.

I didn't go there lightly. I knew even then that this was the beginning of something very hard to reverse. But I couldn't do otherwise now: I was too possessed

How can I explain this? Why is it you can never hope to describe the emotion Africa creates? You are lifted. Out of whatever pit, unbound from whatever tie, released from whatever fear. You are lifted and you see it all from above. Your pit, your ties, your fear. you are lifted, you slowly rise like a hot-air balloon, and all you see is the space and the endless possibilities for losing yourself in it.

she felt] sorry for herself, for getting older, for being mortal, for all the music she still wanted to hear, the books she intended to read, the places she had meant to visit, the things she had promised herself she'd learn one day [...] and probably never would because time was beginning to feel like a fast express train that no longer stopped at all the stations.

You chose to live here now. You should try to live in the present.

Passion - eventually it cools.

Telling the truth can be a dirty job.

I had fallen out of my secure world, precipitated beyond the territories I had only begun to control so skillfully. What a foolish step to take. What an insane move to make.

Suddenly it all seemed luminously clear. Love had very little to do with fear and emotional sabotage; love had to do with trust.

When people die and especially when they die tragically, others can't help but get carried away. They come up with their implausible interpretation and usually resort to cheap psychology. A sense of fatalism is the only form of relief left.

These were the moments that would stick in her memory for years to come, those instants of perfect bliss that nothing else would ever match again.