Venice Quotes

“Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“There is still one of which you never speak.'

Marco Polo bowed his head.

'Venice,' the Khan said.

Marco smiled. 'What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?'

The emperor did not turn a hair. 'And yet I have never heard you mention that name.'

And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“Nellie grinned. "I always wanted to go to Venice. It's supposed to be the romance capital of the world."
"Sweet," put in Dan. "Too bad your date is an Egyptian Mau on a hunger strike."
The au pair sighed. "Better than an eleven-year-old with a big mouth.”
― Gordon Korman, One False Note

“We didn't stow away!" Dan protested. "You sunk our boat and pulled us out of the canal!"
"Good point," Ian agreed. "Return them to the canal. Roughly, please.”
― Gordon Korman, One False Note

“Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.”
― Truman Capote

“Getting lost is the only place worth going to.”
― Tiziano Scarpa

“It's temples and palaces did seem
Like fabrics of enchantment pil'd to heaven.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation

“And off in the far distance, the gold on the wings of the angel atop the bell tower of San Marco flashed in the sun, bathing the entire city in its glistening benediction.”
― Donna Leon, Death in a Strange Country

“In winter you wake up in this city, especially on Sundays, to the chiming of its innumerable bells, as though behind your gauze curtains a gigantic china teaset were vibrating on a silver tray in the pearl-gray sky. You fling the window open and the room is instantly flooded with this outer, peal-laden haze, which is part damp oxygen, part coffee and prayers. No matter what sort of pills, and how many, you've got to swallow this morning, you feel it's not over for you yet. No matter, by the same token, how autonomous you are, how much you've been betrayed, how thorough and dispiriting in your self-knowledge, you assume there is still hope for you, or at least a future. (Hope, said Francis Bacon, is a good breakfast but bad supper.) This optimism derives from the haze, from the prayer part of it, especially if it's time for breakfast. On days like this, the city indeed acquires a porcelain aspect, what with all its zinc-covered cupolas resembling teapots or upturned cups, and the tilted profile of campaniles clinking like abandoned spoons and melting in the sky. Not to mention the seagulls and pigeons, now sharpening into focus, now melting into air. I should say that, good though this place is for honeymoons, I've often thought it should be tried for divorces also - both in progress and already accomplished. There is no better backdrop for rapture to fade into; whether right or wrong, no egoist can star for long in this porcelain setting by crystal water, for it steals the show. I am aware, of course, of the disastrous consequence the above suggestion may have for hotel rates here, even in winter. Still, people love their melodrama more than architecture, and I don't feel threatened. It is surprising that beauty is valued less than psychology, but so long as such is the case, I'll be able to afford this city - which means till the end of my days, and which ushers in the generous notion of the future.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“She leaned against the bridge’s warm marble balustrade, and looked as far down the darkening canal as the setting sun would allow. She wondered if others appreciated Venice’s beauty and fragility as deeply as she had come to or if, like a raging fever, the city infected some while avoiding others. She sighed at the grandeur and at the resilience that surrounded her, and she promised herself she’d try to be more like Venice.”
― Marie Ohanesian Nardin, Beneath the Lion's Wings

“The experts are right, he thought. Venice is sinking. The whole city is slowly dying. One day the tourists will travel here by boat to peer down into the waters, and they will see pillars and columns and marble far, far beneath them, slime and mud uncovering for brief moments a lost underworld of stone. Their heels made a ringing sound on the pavement and the rain splashed from the gutterings above. A fine ending to an evening that had started with brave hope, with innocence. ("Don't Look Now")”
― Daphne du Maurier, Echoes from the Macabre: Selected Stories

“By day it is filled with boat traffic - water
buses, delivery boats, gondolas - if something floats
and it's in Venice, it moves along the Grand Canal.
And by daylight it is one of the glories of the Earth.
But at night, especially when the moon is full
and the soft illumination reflects off the water and
onto the palaces - I don't know how to describe
it so I won't, but if you died and in your will you
asked for your ashes to be spread gently on the
Grand Canal at midnight with a full moon,
everyone would know this about you - you loved and understood beauty.”
― William Goldman, The Silent Gondoliers

“Streets flooded. Please advise.”
― Robert Benchley

“She dreamed of Venice. However, it wasn’t a city alive with stars dripping like liquid gold into canals, or Bougainvillea spilling from flowerpots like overfilled glasses of wine. In this dream, Venice was without color. Where pastel palazzi once lined emerald lagoons, now, gray, shadowy mounds of rubble paralleled murky canals. Lovers could no longer share a kiss under the Bridge of Sighs; it had been the target of an obsessive Allied bomb in search of German troops. The only sign of life was in Piazza San Marco, where the infamous pigeons continued to feed. However, these pigeons fed not on seeds handed out by children, but on corpses rotting under the elongated shadow of the Campanile.”
― Pamela Allegretto, Bridge of Sighs and Dreams

“General Grant seriously remarked to a particularly bright young woman that Venice would be a fine city if it were drained.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“When I seek another word for ‘music’, I never find any other word than ‘Venice’.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

“Mestre. Say the word without hissing the conurbated villain, and pitying its citizens. As quickly as they can, two million tourists pass through, or by, Mestre each year, and each one will be struck by the same thought as they wonder at the aesthetic opposition that it represents. Mestre is an ugly town but ugly only in the same way that Michael Jackson might be desccribed as eccentric or a Tabasco Vindaloo flambéed in rocket fuel might be described as warm. Mestre is almost excremental in its hideousness: a fetid, fly-blown, festering, industrial urbanization, scarred with varicose motorways, flyovers, rusting railway sidings and the rubbish of a billion holidaymakers gradually burning, spewing thick black clouds into the Mediterranean sky. A town with apparently no centre, a utilitarian ever-expandable wasteland adapted to house the displaced poor, the shorebound, outpriced, domicile-deprived exiles from its neighbouring city. For, just beyond the condom- and polystyrene-washed, black-stained, mud shores of Marghera, Mestre's very own oil refinery, less than a mile away across the waters of the lagoon in full sight of its own dispossessed citizens, is the Jewel of Adriatic. Close enough for all to feel the magnetism, there stands the most beautiful icon of Renaissance glory and, like so much that can attract tourism, a place too lovely to be left in the hands of its natives, the Serenissima itself, Venice.”
― Marius Brill, Making Love: A Conspiracy of the Heart

“To be Venetian, and to know how to live in Venice is an art. It is our way of living, so different from the rest of the world. Venice is built not only of stone but of a very thin web of words, spoken and remembered, of stories and legends, of eye-witness accounts and hearsay. To work and operate in Venice means first of all to understand its differences and its fragile equilibrium. In Venice we move delicately and in silence. And with great subtlety. We are a very Byzantine people, and that is certainly not easy to understand.”
― John Berendt, The City of Falling Angels

“Because, my dear Eric, I have tasted the secret knowledge. I know how much to say and when to pull back. I know what to see and not see. And now that I have become whole again, I can never go back. All these things he has given me. Better than my supposed mother and father ever could. For that, I owe him my life and allegiance.”
― Melika Dannese Lux, Corcitura

“And now he lay, a pile of clean bones and tatters of flesh, in a box in a church, and even the policeman, sent to find his killer, could summon up no real grief at his early death.”
― Donna Leon, A Noble Radiance

“Everyone in Venice is acting. Everyone plays a role, and the role changes. The key to understanding Venetians is rhythm -- the rhythm of the lagoon, the rhythm of the water, the tides, the waves...”
― John Berendt, The City of Falling Angels

“Bribery is a way of life in Venice, but you can't really call it bribery. It's accepted as a legitimate part of the economy.”
― John Berendt, The City of Falling Angels

“It's worse than absurd. It's contradictory, hypocritical, irresponsible, dangerous, dishonest, corrupt, unfair, and completely mad. Welcome to Venice.”
― John Berendt, The City of Falling Angels

“Paintings all around the city had become soot-blackened, moldy, and brittle. Many of the most important were housed in churches, where they were unprotected from the elements because of holes in the roofs. At the same time, a great many buildings had eroding foundations and crumbling facades. It was a common hazard for chunks of walls bricks, slabs of marble, cornices, and other decorative elements to come crashing down from on high. The whole eastern wall of the Gesuiti Church was in danger of falling into an adjacent canal. After part of a marble angel fell from a parapet of the ornate but sadly dilapidated Santa Maria della Salute Church, Arrigo Cipriani, the owner of Harry's Bar, posted a sign outside the church warning, "Beware of Falling Angels.”
― John Berendt, The City of Falling Angels

“Strong stuff, but you once told me that Venetians always mean the opposite of what they say.
True, and when I told you that, I meant the opposite of what I said.”
― John Berendt, The City of Falling Angels

“Why a perfect ending? Things are left hanging.
Yes, but this is the sort of ending Venice can live with, happily and forever. Look what the story offers: a great fire, a cultural calamity, the spectacle of public officials blaming each other, an unseemly rush for the money to rebuild the theater, the satisfaction of a trial with guilty verdicts and jail sentences, the pride of the Fenice's rebirth, and and unsolved mystery. Money secretly changing hands. Unnamed culprits hiding in the shadows. It stimulates the imagination, gives people the freedom to make up any scenario they want. What more could anyone ask?”
― John Berendt, The City of Falling Angels

“Toen Jan Liefkind de ruimte betrad viel zijn mond van verbazing open. Langzaam liep hij langs de tot aan het plafond gevulde schappen. Hier leek de poëzie van de hele wereld bij elkaar te staan.
‘Is dit een bibliotheek?’ vroeg hij aan de rode dame. Ze schudde haar hoofd.
‘Dit is een winkel,’ zei ze. ‘Mijn winkel. Het is mijn hobby.’
Ze ging hem voor naar de kast met Nederlandse poëzie. Gorter, Leopold, Nijhoff, Bloem, Vroman. Allemaal stonden ze daar, onaangeraakt. Zelfs van hem stonden er twee bundels.
Jan Liefkind liep verder. Twee planken met IJslandse poëzie, een kast vol Japanse bundels, twee kasten met Franse poëzie. Hij trok er een bundeltje van Michaux uit dat hij niet kende. Bulgaars, Roemeens, Grieks. Vier boekjes uit Bangladesh. De dame met het rode haar en de zigeunerrok had ze van over de hele wereld naar haar winkel in Venice laten komen. Hier stonden ze nu, te wachten op een aardbeving of een brand.
Hij rekende het Franse boekje met haar af.
‘Verkoopt u wel eens wat?’ vroeg Jan Liefkind.
‘Een doodenkele keer,’ zei ze terwijl ze het boekje in een papieren zak deed.

― USA Cabaret”
― J. Bernlef, Tegenliggers

“The idea for this book came to me in 1985 in Venice as I watched that city interact with sea, sky, and wind.”
― Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin

“That there is a strange kinship between Venice and Varanasi has often been noted: both cities are like portals in time; they seem to draw you into lost ways of life. And in both cities, as nowhere else in the world, you become aware of mortality.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Gun Island

“Waiters carried trays of Campari spritz cocktails that looked like glowing red orbs, served with slices of fresh orange, and guests nibbled on canapés as they visited the different tables covered in decadent displays: seafood towers filled with shrimp, snow crab, oysters, clams, and freshly boiled langoustine tails, six large copper pots filled with different kinds of risotto simmering at a low temperature, intricate, multicolored stained-glass raviolis stuffed with smoked salmon and cream cheese, and a bread display that looked like an abstract sculpture.”
― Emily Arden Wells, Eat Post Like