Quotes About Influence

Was it Lila who had persuaded Stefano to behave in a way that was making them the most admired and most talked about couple in the neighborhood? Was this her latest invention? Did she want to leave the neighborhood by staying in the neighborhood? Did she want to drag us out of ourselves, tear off the old skin and put on a new one, suitable for what she was inventing?

I now knew a method of speaking and writing that—by means of a refined vocabulary, stately and thoughtful pacing, a determined arrangement of arguments, and a formal orderliness that wasn't supposed to fail—sought to annihilate the interlocutor to the point where he lost the will to object.

It was as if, because of an evil spell, the joy or sorrow of on required the sorrow or joy of the other; even our physical aspect, it seemed to me, shared in that swing.

Do men learn from women? Often. Do they admit it publicly? Rarely, even today.

Yet here she was insisting that I stay with her, to keep me from who knows what stormy sea, from who knows what abyss or precipice, all dangers that at that moment were represented in her eyes by Antonio. But staying near her meant staying in her world, becoming completely like her. And if I became like her, who would be right for me if not Antonio?

As I traveled toward Milan, I discovered that, with Lila set aside, I didn't know how to give myself substance except by modeling myself on Nino. I was incapable of being a model for myself. Without him I no longer had a nucleus from which to expand outside the neighborhood and through the world, I was a pile of debris.

I thought: not even Lila, in spite of everything, has managed to escape from my mother's world.

They were just like the relations from whom I had fled as a girl. I couldn't bear them and yet they held me tight, I had them all inside me.

When I gave signs of protest she nearly reminded me of the money she was giving me. She stopped in time, but not so that I didn't understand: it was like when someone is about to hit you and then doesn't.

it possible that our parents never die, that every child inevitably conceals them in himself? Would my mother truly emerge from me, with her limping gait, as my destiny?

because who am I if you aren't great?

Only she can say if, in fact, she has managed to insert herself into this extremely long chain of words to modify my text, to purposely supply the missing links, to unhook others without letting it show, to say of me more than I want, more than I'm able to say.

Lila's world, as usual, rapidly superimposed itself on mine. Everything that I had written in July and August seemed to me trivial, I was seized by a frenzy to redeem myself.

Suntem obligaÈ›i s? facem atâtea lucruri stupide înc? de mici crezând c? sunt esenÈ›iale.

Eve can't, doesn't know how, doesn't have the material to be Eve outside of Adam. Her evil and her good are evil and good according to Adam. Eve is Adam as a woman. And the divine work was so successful that she herself, in herself, doesn't know what she is, she has pliable features, she doesn't possess her own language, she doesn't have a spirit or logic of her own, she loses her shape easily.

Pour moi, devenir, c'était devenir dans son sillage. Or, je devais recommencer à devenir mais pour moi, en tant qu'adulte, en dehors d'elle.

Carracci's possessions, she, too, was Carracci's possession.

She knew how to go beyond the limit without ever truly suffering the consequences. In the end people gave in, and were even, however unwillingly, compelled to praise her.

Should I restrain this shadow—my mother, all our female ancestors—or should I let her go?

that my cult of study had always seemed to her foolish, that it wasn't books that made people good but good people who made some good books.

Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote.

Fiz uma pausa, depois continuei: talvez haja algo errado nessa vontade dos homens de nos instruir; na época eu era uma menina e não percebia que, naquele seu desejo de me transformar, estava a prova de que não gostava de mim tal como eu era, queria que eu fosse outra, ou melhor, não desejava simplesmente uma mulher, mas uma mulher como ele imaginava que poderia ser se tivesse nascido mulher.

She claimed that she was in the service of the workers, and yet, from her room in a house full of books and with a view of the sea, she wanted to command you, she wanted to tell you what you should do with your work, she decided for you, she had the solution ready even if you ended up in the street.

My life forces me to imagine what hers would have been if what happened to me had happened to her, what use she would have made of my luck. And her life continuously appears in mine, in the words that I've uttered, in which there's often an echo of hers, in a particular gesture that is an adaptation of a gesture of hers, in my less which is such because of her more, in my more which is the yielding to the force of her less.