Antonio Delfini

"Thought is prophecy and memory. life is the future and the past. Life is never present. The present never is. (From Diaries, 1927-1961)"

"We want to change the world, or change its place. (From Notes of a Stranger, Marka, 1990)"

"I was promoted to serf (that's progress). (From Diaries, 1927-1961)"

"(In parentheses I declare my hatred for all those who for Rome or from Rome wanted, against me and against many other Italians, to sow the seed of dejection on my - on our - proud feeling of not being born in Rome, not to live in Rome, and on my - our - impression that in Rome, and only in Rome, one finds that given form of life that the demeaners of this century call province and provincialism). (From Introduction, pp. 71-92)"

"Then remembering that the Viennese dancer had told me that after Modena, she would go to Bologna, and then to Ferrara, I resolved one evening to go to this city. I took the road to Finale (a bad road at the time). Near Medolla my car was stoned by a group of young fascists. Those were the times of economic sanctions, and the country fascists had tasked avant-gardists, and perhaps even balilla, with demonstrating against cars that dared to circulate anyway. These cars, according to propaganda, wasted the petrol necessary for the conquest of the Empire. I declare that I too had (for other sentimental reasons) a dislike for cars, so those stones cheered me up, and indeed inspired me with a bit of envy towards those boys: I would have liked to be one of them. Even today I would happily throw stones at cars. (From Introduction, pp. 79-80)"

"I went to Bologna on the trail of Stendhaliane days and I lost myself, with my heart squeezed like a sensitive hazelnut in his shell, in the itineraries of Dino Campana. If I had been a poet instead of a bourgeois on the road to disappointment, that would have been the time to write some poems. I left Florence around midday and an hour later I was in Bologna. I wandered around all the streets and when I couldn't stand it anymore due to tiredness, I went to the station and took the first train to Florence: this also happened at two or three in the morning. The strangeness was this: that being in Florence, I ignored Florence and got to know Bologna. (From Introduction, pp. 93-94)"

"She took a long sigh and slowly stood up. Big and heavy, with a wide and long gray skirt with black stripes, and a dark, all-worked blouse that smelled like a closed cupboard with biscuits forgotten inside. (From The Milliner, p. 123)"

"Meanwhile, a Barbery organ, the sound of which reached me from the courtyard of a house in Via Campanoni, changed the course of my reveries. Looking inside the bookcase I realized that the girl was no longer there. (From One year later, p. 214)"

"For me then, every encounter with a woman is like suddenly finding myself in front of an abyss, and with my eyes blindfolded. (From One year later, p. 215)"

"It is necessary, in humanity, to use all those means that liberate and console as much as possible the conscious souls, poor or rich."

"The moon is like freedom: it is in the sky and at the bottom of the well."

"Why didn't they give us a life different from the one we live?"

"What we must do is not to be ashamed of feelings that are too great."

"If it weren't for the suffering of others to make us laugh, we would never laugh."

"A writer is always someone, to me, who has failed at something else in life."

"Antonio Delfini, Diari, 1927-1961, edited by Giovanna Delfini and Natalia Ginzburg, Einaudi, 1982."

"Antonio Delfini, The memory of the Basque, Nistri - Lischi, Pisa, 1956."

"Antonio Delfini, Piccolo libro dense, in Gino Ruozzi, Italian writers of aphorisms, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore."

"Antonio Delfini, Poems of the end of the world, Feltrinelli, 1961."