Non Fiction Authors From Italy

"Jealousy is the fear of being alone, now that the perfect formula for wholeness has been found, which means completion, security."

"The end is not a distant appointment, but a present that perpetuates itself, and so we die continuously and are dead even when we breathe."

"The fragility of fine Murano glass or Bohemian crystal: beautiful, elegant, but it takes very little for it to shatter and turn into useless fragments. Knowing its nature, one must be careful how one uses it, how one preserves it: one must keep it away from places where impetuous actions are performed, because otherwise that fine glass becomes nothing, just a memory."

"Man would not survive in the dark without a light bulb to illuminate a page to read or to power a computer on which to type a new world, which also depends on energy."

"Violence does not make history, it is not a difficulty that can be worked through, but simply a war that leads only to the death of love and sometimes even of its protagonists."

"The old man lives on the dead and awaits death."

"Love has nothing free about it, because fear does not allow this utopia to be exercised."

"Fragility remakes man, while power destroys him, reducing him to fragments that turn to dust."

"The sense of belonging. This is marriage."

"Marriage is my life with her and our children, but none of us can say that it has been a forty-year trip out of town."

"Marriage is the greatest of human frailties, capable of producing good and incapable of avoiding evil."

"The limit of energy becomes the limit of civilization, of a civilization that seems to be one of well-being and that at times appears to be a civilization of waste."

"In the family, where daily disagreements have disappeared, dramas made up of extreme behaviors arise."

"To accept defeat, you have to believe in those who decree it, you have to be sure that the competitions are not rigged, that they do not become a business, but that they are conducted with absolute respect for skills and talents, whatever field they may be in."

"Pain is the primary source of fragility because it breaks you and you feel shattered, unable to put the pieces you see in yourself back together; indeed, you are a pile of fragments, grains of sand that should come together and shape, sculpt a man."

"Pain makes more noise than any other noise."

"The powerful do not believe they need to be resurrected because they think they are unshakable, like the Eiffel Tower made of iron and not flesh, soulless, cold as a railroad track."

"Pain is a quality of being fragile."

"If your neighbor is antisocial and does not like your noise, he turns on his own and cancels yours."

"Well, if I have been, and am, a good psychiatrist, if I have helped my crazy patients, it is because of my fragility, because of the fear of a madness that lurks within me, because of the fragility that I feel capable of splitting me in two, of taking away my will to live and making me like a depressed person who only wants to disappear in order to erase the pain that shapes him."

"The Song of Songs speaks of necessary love: being two makes it possible to exist for those who separately would not have made it, would have broken."

"All it takes is a hundred people willing to die as suicide bombers, strapping explosives to themselves, to render ridiculous the system of certainty and the certainty of power on this earth, of the potentates of this world."

"Interviewer: You can't joke about faith. Andreoli: Not faith in God, let's leave that aside. I'm talking about believing. Thinking that tomorrow, at eight in the morning, there will be a miracle. Then whether it's God, Saint Januarius, or anyone else, it doesn't matter. In short, to be clear, we live in a disaster, in a sewer, but we believe that tomorrow morning at eight there will be a miracle that will change our lives. We're waiting for Godot, who isn't there. But try explaining that to Italians."

"Interviewer: Hidden masochism, ruthless individualism, acting, belief in miracles. We're in a terrible state, Professor Andreoli. Andreoli: That's right. No psychiatrist can save this patient that is Italy. I can't even take away these symptoms, because without them you would feel dead."

"[The British] never talk. Instead, we talk even when we listen to music or read the newspaper."

"The powerful do not know how to love; the man of iron is cold, he knows how to envelop and bind in order to subjugate, to enslave."

"Professor Van Helsing is the priest of Good who, given the times, does not wear the robes of a monk or priest, but the garb of science. And so he interprets well the period in which the action takes place: positivism. A priest, therefore, who uses reason, the power of science, but who does not forget the sacred, magical instruments."

"Interviewer:Exhibitionists Andreoli: Of course, this is the mask that hides masochism. And keep in mind that, generally speaking, exhibitionism is a sexuality disorder. Showing off one's organ, but not because it is powerful. To compensate for impotence."

"The strength of this novel, however, lies in the great and ever-present theme of the struggle between Good and Evil. A titanic struggle that moves from the everyday scene to the tragedies of the classical period and throughout literature with a capital L. After all, Dracula is Evil, even if he has a charm that sometimes captivates, and the group of characters who eliminate him represent Good, not least because they act in the name of Good."

"Beliefs in heaven, populated by the living, express well the denial of death and the desire to remain."

"Among the possible metamorphoses of Dracula, the most significant, so much so that it has become known to all, is into a bird, a bat. The symbolism of the bird is boundless and is also part of life. The penis is popularly called a bird: precisely because it rises and in that flight gives life, the seed. The bat is a strange creature, we might say perverse: both because it belongs to the mammals and not to the bird species, and because it is nocturnal and at night becomes a bird of sin, of the forbidden. It also has the characteristics of attracting and repelling. During the day, it has no life and remains hanging limply in a cave, while in the dark it is reborn and continuously searches for its prey in that unstoppable flight. Blood therefore recalls the bird-penis, and the image of the ‘baptism of blood’ with Mrs. Mina attached to Dracula's chest, in a position reminiscent of fellatio, is evocative."

"We must now have the courage to say that the count even manages to soften us, to make us feel sorry for him. After all, he is not the monster with superhuman and unstoppable strength, one of those who appear on today's screens of stupidity. Dracula is still a man, he was one while he was alive, in the historical sense of the term; he was a hero, one who saved his people from the Turks, and at that time, the word ‘Turk’ brought to mind evil and extreme violence. A dead character yet full of needs: during the day he must return to a coffin hidden in the ground of the cemetery where he was buried, so much so that he must always carry it with him. He is terrified of good or signs of good: the silver crucifixes and consecrated wafers that Professor Van Helsing uses as his weapons of defense. He is a monster who is afraid and who can be defeated, so much so that this is the conclusion of the story."

"Sucking is the gesture of life, the way in which a newborn baby lives. It attaches itself to the breast and devours it. Life passes from the mother to the child, who sucks it in. It remains a gesture full of charm, and in adult erotic games, sucking plays an important role: once again, it is a symbol of vital force. Dracula has none of the oral aggression of those who eat; on the contrary, he never eats, he only sucks. And in this, he has remained at the gesture of newborn life, the primary movement par excellence: if the child did not know how to suck, it would die."

"[Second symptom of Italy's mental illness] Ruthless individualism. And mind you, I mean this adjective. Because a certain amount of individualism is normal, one must have one's own identity to which one attaches esteem. But when it becomes ruthless..."

"Dracula is a psychiatric novel in the sense that it focuses on strange behavior. The word madness is frequently used."

"(About Abraham Van Helsing) He is a psychiatrist, although he has many other specialties: he is a surgeon but also practices hypnosis, which he does regularly with Mina. He was one of Dr. Seward's teachers. He deals with the occult sciences: a term that well expresses the attempt to heal the contradiction between positivism and mystery."

"Dr. John Seward is the director of the Purfleet asylum, and throughout my reading of Bram Stoker's Dracula, I felt as if I had returned to San Giacomo della Tomba, my old asylum. For this reason, among others, the book literally drew me into its pages with the kind of engagement that only great writers can achieve. [...] If a novel has this ability, it is a masterpiece and needs no further proof. It is the mark that each reader leaves on it, and when they put it back on the shelf, it is almost as if they are separating themselves from something they have entered into and can only leave knowing that the book is there waiting and can be reread at any time."

"Isn't choice already an expression of freedom, even if only a basic one?"

"I deeply believe that priests are figures of great importance for non-believers."

"Fear is a defense mechanism that allows us to be aware of danger and therefore to take action to avoid its consequences."

"‘'The case of Renfield’', although fictionalized, does not lose its connotation of psychiatry and that of the time. On the contrary, it serves to raise a very pressing issue at the time: the relationship between mental illness, a natural phenomenon, and demonic possession, which is an extra-natural phenomenon. The psychiatric category that best lends itself to this issue is that which allows for rapid changes in behavior and thought. Renfield goes from a phase of excitement and delirium to a state of calm and apparent normality. Renfield's delirium is the need to feed on living creatures in order to obtain vital energy for himself and thus not die. To this end, he asks for sugar, which he places on the windowsill of his hospital cell to attract flies, which he then swallows. A subsequent phase is to encourage the development of spiders that feed on flies and then swallow them. And the next plan is to have mice that eat spiders and cats that eat mice, so that by eating cats he gains extraordinary vital energy. His whole life is conditioned and focused on this idea."

"The most beautiful dimension is that of the priest who has nothing, but who is an integral part of an active and attentive community, within a flock that loves him."

"Despair is madness. Madness, the perception of the impossibility of living: being there, but as if not being there. Despair as an experience of madness is incompatible with life. It sees death, plans death, and kills itself and the other. Despair is a madness possible to man, to all men; it is, in fact, a perspective of man, linked to his need to be with others, to the fact that he cannot live alone, because human life is not solitude but sharing, belonging, attachment. Killing is a moment of infinite and incurable despair, and then the world appears useless and harmful and an individual perceives himself as irreducible to the world, as an alien, as an alienated person. A human feeling, possible, compatible with normality. Killing is linked to the madness of normality, to that capacity of man which, when in crisis, instead of helping him to live, transforms him into death and pushes him to kill and ruin himself, to kill himself. Madness is different from a clinical point of view, but also from a legal one (the inability to understand and intend: an infirmity that has arisen, preventing the human machine from functioning). I see madness as a mechanism that mirrors that of despair, of the feeling of the end: the incomprehensibility of the world, pulling out of it. Still being on the planet without knowing it. Close to others without needing the other. Even losing the memory of words and their meaning, giving up on communicating. Schizophrenia is an extraordinary example of this: being in the world as if the world were ending and as if being had no meaning, since all meaning is based on relationships. The schizophrenic is an island, a monad locked in a cell of existence, in a prison of the world. In isolation because that way they can still breathe. Life that comes closest to death. In short, madness already has to do with death, though not in its physical representation, but in its psychological representation, personality, and social representation, relationships. There are three kinds of death: that of the body, the most emblematic and absolute; that of the mind, which allows the body to remain active and even to take on an air of elegance; and then social death: deprived of every dimension, as if we had become transparent and, even within a crowd, no one could see us. The madman is a dead man who walks and breathes. If he kills, he does so without despair, perhaps out of anger; he is a corpse who kills. Madness has already overcome despair and for this reason lives without living, lives as if dead and, if it kills, kills already dead."

"I don't know if the present time has brought us great benefits, but it has certainly invented a lot of fears."

"A two-stage illness, disorder-disappearance of the disorder (normality), focuses attention because it is closest to demonic possession: when the demon possesses the body, the possessed person exhibits behaviors that disappear immediately when the demon leaves as a result of some therapy (exorcism). Dr. Seward's interest in Renfield probably stems from Kraeplin's discovery of manic-depressive illness in 1895: in the same patient, a phase of mania can be followed by a phase of depression in temporal sequence."

"The priest seems to me to be the most appropriate person to talk about death: he knows that it is not a subject for despair."

"The old priest now knows that man errs, and that this often produces only temporary effects, so that what ultimately makes complete sense is precisely prayer."

"The non-believer is someone who feels the limits of their own existence, and who, while using reason and considering it the best way to solve many existential problems, and certainly as a scientific tool, wants to push it further to question the mystery."

"The memory of images is stored within us, and it is to this that we attach our feelings."

"w:it:Chiara Lubich - L'amore vince tutto (2021)"