Quotes from Mario Puzo

Nunca se aborreça — Don Corleone o havia instruído. — Nunca faça uma ameaça. Argumente com as pessoas.

Friendship is everything. Friendship is more than talent. It is more than government. It is almost the equal of family. Never forget that. If you had built up a wall of friendships you wouldn't have to ask me to help.

delicious icy chilliness that controlled his brain

No existía ninguna atmósfera mejor que la del dinero para entrar en razones.

The government in Rome with its legal forms demanded the truth. The priest in the confessional box commanded the truth under pain of everlasting hell. But truth was a source of power, a lever of control, why should anyone give it away?

Don Corleone was too weak to speak much but he wished to listen and exercise veto powers.

Don had made a fewer mistakes and learned from every one of them

He reminded him that whatever sins were committed here on earth, no man must forget that eternal forgiveness awaited him if he were a proper Christian.

The Cleveland syndicate, perhaps the most powerful of the strictly gambling operations in the United States, was represented by a sensitive-looking elderly man with gaunt features and snow-white hair. He was known, of course not to his face, as "the Jew" because he had surrounded himself with Jewish assistants rather than Sicilians. It was even rumored that he would have named a Jew as his Consigliere if he had dared.

Don Corleone had promised his godson he would get the part and Don Corleone had never, to Hagen's knowledge, broken his word in such matters.

But time erodes gratitude more quickly than it does beauty.

Christian forgiveness was a contemptible refuge of the coward.

In short, the gabbellotto was a mafioso who for a certain sum of money protected the real estate of the rich from all claims made on it by the poor, legal or illegal. When any poor peasant tried to implement the law which permitted him to buy uncultivated land, the gabbellotto frightened him off with threats of bodily harm or death. It was that simple.

His appearance was intimidating not from any single feature but from a lifelong habit of presenting a formidable front to the outside world.

But his Godfather had never said such and such a thing could be done without having it done.

Nothing could hide the tiredness of their spirit and their flesh; time had eroded their godhead. They posed and moved as charmingly as he remembered but they were like wax fruit, they could not lubricate his glands.

friend should always underestimate your virtues and an enemy overestimate your faults.

la cosa ya no tiene remedio y debemos olvidarla.

Qué clase de hombres seríamos si careciéramos de la facultad de razonar?

Nothing was going to stop him from owning this girl, possessing her, locking her in a house and keeping her prisoner only for himself.

Bija prieks atkal piev?rsties rakst?šanai ar galvu, kas skaidra no koka?na un patiesas m?lest?bas.

in the hot blood of vendetta they would shotgun the Pope himself for breaking omerta, the ancient code of silence to any authority.

It's more important that you grow up to be a man," he said, "than to be a genius.

Mantén a tus amigos cerca, pero a tus enemigos más cerca