Alessandro Baricco Quotes & Sayings

Sooner or later you'll have to tell the truth to someone. — Alessandro Baricco

Seeing in the air things that the others did not see. — Alessandro Baricco

To die of yearning for something you will never experience — Alessandro Baricco

He fell to the ground like an olive tree, young, beautiful, strong, covered with white blossoms, suddenly shattered by a bolt of lightning in a storm. — Alessandro Baricco

I did not love you out or boredom or loneliness or caprice. I loved you because the desire for you was stronger than any happiness. — Alessandro Baricco

Read the flight of your arrow if you want to know your future. — Alessandro Baricco

Faces change during sex, the features change and it would be a pity not to understand that, because with a man inside, moving on him, you can read his whole life in his face and it's a book that at that moment he can't close.

One needn't be afraid to talk, making love, because the voice we have when we make love is what is most secret in us and the words we are capable of the only shocking, final, total nudity available to us.

Making love is an endless attempt to find a position in which to merge with the other, a position that doesn't exist, but looking for it exists and knowing how to look is an art. — Alessandro Baricco

Only the rustle of those colours waving in the air, impenetrable, lighter than nothingness — Alessandro Baricco

And carefully he brought Time to a halt, for as long as he wished. — Alessandro Baricco

And a while later:
'It is a strange sort of pain.'
Softly.
'To die of yearning for something you'll never experience. — Alessandro Baricco

As you see, it is not that I don't know my own mind, I know it very well but only up to a certain point in the matter. I know perfectly well what the question is. It's the answer I want. — Alessandro Baricco

We are full of words whose true meaning we haven't been taught, and one of those words is suffering. Another is the word death. We don't know what they mean, but we use them, and this is a mystery. — Alessandro Baricco

When loneliness mastered him he would go up to the cemetery ... The rest of his time was taken up with a liturgy of habits that succeeded in warding off sadness. — Alessandro Baricco

The last light, in the last window, went out. Only the unstoppable machine of the sea still tears away at the silence with the cyclical explosion of nocturnal waves, distant memories of sleepwalking storms and the shipwrecks of dream. — Alessandro Baricco

You can't sow without plowing first. First you have to break up the earth. — Alessandro Baricco

In front of him, nothing. He had a sudden glimpse of what he had considered invisible. The end of the world. — Alessandro Baricco

You're never really done for, as long as you've got a good story and someone to tell it to. — Alessandro Baricco

As eight years before, he was leaving ... to rewrite his destiny in orderly fashion. — Alessandro Baricco

Because despair was an excess that did not belong to him, he submitted to what was left of his life, and began again to look after it, with the unyielding tenacity of a gardener at work the morning after the storm. — Alessandro Baricco

It will not have escaped you that this town simulates normality that is completely illusory: every day something happens that one might euphemistically call irritating. — Alessandro Baricco

I often thought about him during the war; if only 1900 were here, who knows what he'd do, what he'd say. 'Fuck war' he'd say. But somehow, coming from me, it wasn't the same. — Alessandro Baricco

It's a strange grief ... to die of nostalgia for something you you will never live. — Alessandro Baricco

This is the seashore. Neither land nor sea. It's a place that does not exist. — Alessandro Baricco

He wasn't much cut out for serious conversations. And a goodbye is a serious conversation. — Alessandro Baricco

Do you have children? she asked.
No.
Why?
The man answered that one had to have faith in the world to have children. — Alessandro Baricco

There is nothing that can, in the dark become true — Alessandro Baricco

Definitive resolutions are made always and only in a state of mind that is not destined to last. — Alessandro Baricco

Until the last glimmer of daylight. — Alessandro Baricco

In the world I inhabit, there is a shortage of intellectual honesty, but not of intelligence. — Alessandro Baricco

beyond the end of the world — Alessandro Baricco

He was one of those men who like to be observers at their own lives ... such people observe their destiny much as most people tend to observe a rainy day. — Alessandro Baricco

His life fell like rain before his eyes, a quiet spectacle — Alessandro Baricco

There's a sense of incomprehensible apocalypse in the air - we all feel it - and there's a rumor going around: the barbarians are coming. — Alessandro Baricco

Writing to someone is the only way to wait for him without hurting oneself. — Alessandro Baricco

Perhaps sometimes life shows you a side of itself which leaves you with nothing more to say — Alessandro Baricco

Every so often I wonder what on earth we are waiting for. Silence. For it to be too late, Madame. — Alessandro Baricco

... how it would be nice if, for every sea waiting for us, there would be a river, for us.
And someone -a father, a lover, someone- able to take us by the hand and find that river -imagine it, invent it- and put us on its stream, with the lightness of one only word, goodbye. This, really, would be wonderful. It would be sweet, life, every life. And things wouldn't hurt, but they would get near taken by stream, one could first shave and then touch them and only finally be touched. Be wounded, also. Die because of them. Doesn't matter. But everything would be, finally, human. It would be enough someone's fancy -a father, a lover, someone- could invent a way, here in the middle of the silence, in this land which don't wanna talk. Clement way, and beautiful.
A way from here to the sea. — Alessandro Baricco

Say the sea. Say the sea. Say the sea. So that perhaps a drop of that magic may wander through time, and something might find it, and save it before it disappears forever. Say the sea. Because it's what we have left. Because faced by the sea, we without crosses, without magic, we must still have a weapon, something, so as not to die in silence, that's all. — Alessandro Baricco

It was surprising to consider that in fact there were signs, that is the embers of a voice destroyed by fire. — Alessandro Baricco

There are people who die and, with all due respect, you don't lose anything. But he was one of those that when they're gone you feel it. As if the whole world had become, from one day to the next, a little heavier. — Alessandro Baricco

You were dead.'
She said.
'And in the whole world there was nothing beautiful left. — Alessandro Baricco

Reasons get forgotten. — Alessandro Baricco

I once knew a man who built a railway all for himself. — Alessandro Baricco

She had not really a sensitive soul, but to put it in exact terms, was possessed by an uncontrollable feeling of mind — Alessandro Baricco

In this transparency, the footprints of the little birds spoke with a muffled voice. What they spoke of was entirely without significance, or else something capable of lifting a life off its hinges: there was no way of knowing. — Alessandro Baricco