Being Italian Quotes & Sayings

When I'm in England, I know I'm a visitor, but being a white man in England with ancestry that's German and Italian, I have a history with the Romans and the Saxons. I feel some connection and ancestry here, as weird as that sounds. — Nicolas Cage

Being blonde is definitely a different state of mind. I can't really put my finger on it, but the artifice of being blonde has some incredible sort of sexual connotation. Men really respond to it. I love blonde hair but it really does something different to you. I feel more grounded when I have dark hair, and I feel more ethereal when I have light hair. It's unexplainable. I also feel more Italian when my hair is dark. — Madonna Ciccone

I'm imagining your response as you read this letter - which by then will have spent a week or two sitting in this lagoon, then another month riding the chaos of the Italian mail system, before finally crossing the Atlantic and being passed over to the US Post Office, who will have transferred it into a sack to be pushed along in a cart by a mailman who'll have slugged through rain or snow in order to slip it through your mail slot where it will have dropped to the floor, to wait for you to find it. — Nicole Krauss

Acting as a profession came to me by chance: in 1946, after the war, I was having lunch with my cousin, who was the Italian ambassador, and he asked, 'What are you going to do now you're out of uniform?' I said, 'I'm pretty inventive, and I can imitate people,' and he said, 'Have you thought about being an actor?' — Christopher Lee

Italian girls are famous for being snobby and expecting men to make the first move. In America, if I don't make eye contact, the guys won't come over and talk. American girls just go for it. You men are spoiled. — Silvia Colloca

He [Paolo Sarpi] was one of the two foremost Italian statesmen since the Middle Ages, the other being Cavour . — Andrew Dickson White

At forty-two, I was still holding up pretty well, but my once effortlessly lean body now look as though it belonged in a Dove firming cream ad -- the one where they give women permission to have thighs. When I unbuttoned my jeans at night, I swore I heard the same sound that Pillsbury dough made when I twisted the cylindrical container. My hair was beginning to gray, and when I smiled, the parentheses around my mouth remained. My least favorite position in yoga class was the downward dog because, as I hung my head downward, I always felt the skin from my face was about to splatter against my mat like a pancake batter hitting the griddle. So being called the top model by a young Italian was a wonderful souvenir, though cheaper than the toys sold outside the Pantheon in Rome. — Jennifer Coburn

Their (Liverpool) fans are being man-marked by the Italian police. — George Hamilton

Oh stop being so stubborn! You want him to be right, I can tell, I can read you, child. Because if he's right and Imogen's a liar that means you can jump back on that Italian sausage straight away. — Billy London

I was in Italy in 1992 working on magazine articles when I got a call from the Italian travel commission. They asked, would I mind being an escort for an older woman? I told them I don't do that kind of work, but then they said it was Julia Child, and I said I'd be right there. — Bob Spitz

Covered in slivered almonds and soaked in booze, Italian rum cake is everything kids hate about everything. No one even ate it. It just got thrown away. Cake Time is supposed to be the climax of a birthday, but instead it was a crushing disappointment for all. I imagine it's like being at a bachelor party only to find that the stripper has overdosed in the bathroom. — Tina Fey

White, is not a race, it is a color, European, is not a race, it is a place named after the goddess Europa. Caucasian, is not a race, it is a place and mountain range. Gentile, is not a race, it is a biblical name that was given to describe Aryans as non-Jews. Aryan is the biological correct name of our race! Aryan is who we are by blood and the genetic source of our being and beginning. All the numerous names, German, French, Irish, Scotch, Polish, Italian, Norwegian and on and on are simply the many tribal names of the Aryan people. — Ron McVan

Amusingly, Christopher Columbus totally bungled this by relying on subsequent less-accurate calculations and confusing Arabic miles with Italian miles, concluding that he needed to sail only 3,700 km to reach the Orient when the true value was 19,600 km. He clearly wouldn't have gotten his trip funded if he'd done his math right, and he clearly wouldn't have survived if America hadn't existed, so sometimes being lucky is more important than being right. — Max Tegmark

I was born and raised a guido. It's just a lifestyle, it's being Italian, it's representing, family, friends, tanning, gel, everything. — Pauly D

A Frenchman's self-assurance stems from his belief that he is mentally and physically irresistibly fascinating to both men and women. An Englishman's self-assurance is founded on his being a citizen of the best organized state in the world and on the fact that, as an Englishman, he always knows what to do, and that whatever he does as an Englishman is unquestionably correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets. A Russian is self-assured simply because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe in the possibility of knowing anything fully. — Leo Tolstoy

I always knew that food and wine were vital, with my mother being Italian and a good cook. — Robert Mondavi

People take pride in being Irish-American and Italian-American. They have a particular culture that infuses the whole culture and makes it richer and more interesting. I think if we can expand that attitude to embrace African-Americans and Latino-Americans and Asian-Americans, then we will be in a position where all our kids can feel comfortable with the worlds they are coming out of, knowing they are part of something larger. — Barack Obama

I love being Italian. — Connie Stevens

I explained my whole theory about parenting being better if it was like a large Italian family having dinner under a tree while children play. Rebecca poured more wine and explained her theory of child-rearing, which is that you should behave as badly as possible so that the children will rebel against you and turn out like Saffron in Absolutely Fabulous. — Helen Fielding

If there are meta-beings, a god or gods who did not create the world, then they can tell us what to do the same way bullies can, though they have no jurisdiction. They can run our countries like Italian neighborhoods and along the same principles. Do it or get whacked. Bend your knees, slaughter bulls, lick dirt, give us your milk money. But might, even above the human level, does not make right.
But a creative God, a God without whom none of this would be, a God who spoke reality into being and shapes it even now, He has authority. The world is His. You are His the way my words are mine. We are dust spoken from nothing, shaped with the moisture of His breath, named and now-living. — N.D. Wilson

If I ever have kids, this is what I'm going to do with them: I am going to give birth to them on foreign soil - preferably the soil of someplace like Oostende or Antwerp - destinations that have the allure of being obscure, freezing, and impossibly cultured. These are places in which people are casually trilingual and everyone knows how to make good coffee and gourmet dinners at home without having to shop for specific ingredients. Everyone has hip European sneakers that effortlessly look like the exact pair you've been searching for your whole life. Everything is sweetened with honey and even the generic-brand Q-tips are aesthetically packaged. People die from old age or crimes of passion or because they fall off glaciers. All the woman are either thin, thin and happy, fat and happy, or thin and miserable in a glamorous way. Somehow none of their Italian heels get caught in the fifteenth-century cobblestone. Ever. — Sloane Crosley

Thereafter he gave up on a career in the arts and filled a succession of unsuitable vacancies and equally unsuitable women, falling in love whenever he took up a new job, and falling out of love - or more correctly being fallen out of love with - every time he moved on. He drove a removal van, falling in love with the first woman whose house he emptied, delivered milk in an electric float, falling in love with the cashier who paid him every Friday night, worked as an assistant to an Italian carpenter who replaced sash windows in Victorian houses and replaced Julian Treslove in the affections of the cashier, managed a shoe department in a famous London store, falling in love with the woman who managed soft furnishings on the floor above. — Howard Jacobson

The word 'risk' derives from the early Italian risicare, which means 'to dare'. In this sense, risk is a choice rather than a fate. The actions we dare to take, which depend on how free we are to make choices, are what the story of risk is all about. And that story helps define what it means to be a human being. — Peter L. Bernstein

The Italian word 'stanza' means 'a room', and a room is a good way to conceive of a stanza. A room, generally speaking, is sufficient for its own purposes, but it does not constitute a house. A stanza has the same sense of containment, without being complete or independent. — James Fenton

Breakfast was ready. He could hear his father asking for coffee. Why did his father have to yell all the time? Couldn't he talk in a low voice? Everybody in the neighborhood knew everything that went on in their house on account of his father constantly shouting. The Moreys next door - you never heard a peep out of them, never; quiet American people. But his father wasn't satisfied with being an Italian, he had to be a noisy Italian.
'Arturo,' his mother called. 'Breakfast.'
As if he didn't know breakfast was ready! As if everybody in Colorado didn't know by this time that the Bandini family was having breakfast! — John Fante

After karting in Venezuela, I came to Europe in 1998 to compete in international kart races, which was great for me to get experience racing outside my country. After consistently being at the top, I decided to move to Italian Formula Renault. — Pastor Maldonado

The Italian comes to his table with the same open heart with which a child falls into his mother's arms, with the same easy feeling of being in the right place. — Marcella Hazan

It's almost like that's the definition of being American: You love becoming Irish for a day, or becoming Italian ... Or becoming a Negro for four years. — Josh Alan Friedman

When I got back to Rome I discovered that the Italian army considered me dead - in Gruensee, in the observation post, and on the Cima Bianca. That I was reported killed three times seemed not to affect their trust in the reports except to strengthen it. Being the army, they must have thought that anyone who was killed three times was most certainly deader than if he had been killed only once. — Mark Helprin

Now they're attracted to one another, but repelled by their ethnic origins, so that there was something to overcome. They had to overcome their own prejudices, which had been imposed by the culture - their own shame at being Mexican and Italian. — Robert Towne

Germans are self-confident on the basis of an abstract notion - science, that is, the supposed knowledge of absolute truth. A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally, both in mind and body, as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured, as being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world, and therefore as an Englishman always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known. — Leo Tolstoy

He greeted me in his usual attire - pajama pants. "Hey stranger!" he said, hugging me for a few long seconds. "I've already set up the board. Can I get you some rose"
I nodded, overwhelmingly relieved to be with another human being - even if he was really a wolf in grandma's clothing. Or was he just a wolf in wolf's clothing? After all, he wore pajamas ... Hmmm. I contemplated all this as he poured me a glass of wine.
"Mind if I smoke?" he asked as he lit up a joint and motioned me over to the sleek brown couch. Italian, of course.
Through the three windows that faced south, north, and west, I saw the Statue of Liberty, and Ellis Island, where I had paid to have my parents' names inscribed in the immigrant wall of honor. Some American Dream this was! — Inna Swinton

Being Italian, I have a very special relationship with the culinary arts. One my projects was to share Italian cultural food with my colleagues. — Luca Parmitano

I'm very proud of being Italian-American, but people don't realize that the mafia is just this aberration. The real community is built on the working man, the guy who's the cop, the fireman, the truck driver, the bus driver. — Chazz Palminteri

I don't like being called 'macho.' Macho basically means stupid and a real Italian man is not macho, he's smart. That's smart in both senses: elegant and clever. — Andrea Bocelli

There are many great wine producers from all over the world making fantastic wines. Italian wines especially are making an enormous comeback after sometimes being labeled as inexpensive jug wines. — Rocco DiSpirito

We were raised in an Italian-American household, although we didn't speak Italian in the house. We were very proud of being Italian, and had Italian music, ate Italian food. — Francis Ford Coppola

She was a former Texan - proud, loud and stubborn. But you can't really be a former Texan. You can only move out of Texas. To be a former Texan would be like growing up in Italy, moving out and being formerly Italian. — Jeffrey Michelson

Shaftoe opens his eyes just as the tarp is being peeled back from the open top of the truck. He stares straight up into a blue Italian sky torn around the edges by the scrabbling branches of desperate trees. "Shit!" he says. "What's wrong, Sarge?" "I just always say that when I wake up," Shaftoe says. — Neal Stephenson

Instead of Otello being an Italian opera written in the style of Shakespeare, Othello is a play written by Shakespeare in the style of Italian opera. — George Bernard Shaw

I remembered the taste of good Italian coffee in my London flat, brewed at the expense of time and a good deal of mess, compared to the sort that came out of machines in the office at the press of a button. I remembered walking to art school, through the windy winter, over hills and heaths: how much gladder I was to reach the rich warmth and to toast my hands on a radiator, than if I had gone by car. I remembered the nickels my father gave me as a child for being good: how much more I valued them than I would a dollar bill given all at once for no reason. Of course God as the ultimate parent could give happiness for the asking, just as my father could have given a handful of dollar bills, but at the age of five would I have known its value, or would it have looked to me just like a wad of grubby green paper? — Sumangali Morhall

[for indicted foreigners] simple expulsion is not enough ( ... ) they must be arrested immediately, tried using a fast-track procedure, and then expelled to serve their sentences in the countries they came from, ( ... ) it isn't right that foreign criminals are being housed in our [Italian] jails. — Franco Frattini

The strategy of Fabius was not merely an evasion of battle to gain time, but calculated for its effect on the morale of the enemy-and, still more, for its effect on their potential allies. It was thus primarily a matter of war-policy, or grand strategy. Fabius recognized Hannibal's military superiority too well to risk a military decision. While seeking to avoid this, he aimed by military pin-pricks to wear down the invaders' endurance and, coincidentally, prevent their strength being recruited from the Italian cities or their Carthaginian base. The key condition of the strategy by which this grand strategy was carried out was that the Roman army should keep always to the hills, so as to nullify Hannibal's decisive superiority in cavalry. Thus this phase became a duel between the Hannibalic and the Fabian forms of the indirect approach. — B.H. Liddell Hart

I missed the anonymity-the ability to run to the market without running into my third-grade teacher.
I missed the nightlife-the knowledge that if I wanted to, there was always an occasion to get dressed up and head out for dinner and drinks.
I missed the restaurants-the Asian, the Thai, the Italian the Indian. I was already tired of mashed potatoes and canned green beans.
I missed the culture- the security that comes from being on the touring schedule of the major Broadway musicals.
I missed the shopping-the funky boutiques, the eclectic shops, the browsing.
I missed the city. — Ree Drummond