Children Italian Quotes & Sayings

We put [young children] into kindergarten where their reasoning powers are ruined; or, if we can afford it, we buy Montessori outfits that were invented for semi-imbeciles in Italian slums; or we send them to outdoor schools and give them prizes for sleeping. — Katharine Fullerton Gerould

(And did I mention how in summer the streets of Smyrna were lined with baskets of rose petals? And how everyone in the city could speak French, Italian, Greek, Turkish, English, and Dutch? And did I tell you about the famous figs, brought in by camel caravan and dumped onto the ground, huge piles of pulpy fruit lying in the dirt, with dirty women steeping them in salt water and children squatting to defecate behind the clusters? Did I mention how the reek of the fig women mixed with pleasanter smells of almond trees, mimosa, laurel, and peach, and how everybody wore masks on Mardi Gras and had elaborate dinners on the decks of frigates? I want to mention these things because they all happened in that city that was no place exactly, that was part of no country because it was all countries, and because now if you go there you'll see modern high-rises, amnesiac boulevards, teeming sweatshops, a NATO headquarters, and a sign that says Izmir ... ) — Jeffrey Eugenides

The sun woke Tino early this beautiful morning in his small Italian village. — Tonya Russo Hamilton

The Italian landscape has always harmonized the vulgar and the Vitruvian: the contorni around the duomo, the portiere'S laundry across the padrone's portone, Supercortemaggiore against the Romanesque apse. Naked children have never played in our fountains, and I. M. Pei will never be happy on Route 66. — Robert Venturi

The old women were gone. They seemed to have ascended into the darkness like the waxy smoke from the candles after he capped them with the brass bell at the end of the snuffer. For a moment, staring into the darkness, he imagined the rafters full of smoky old women with hair sprouting from their chins. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Whispering in Italian, and Polish, and Latin about dead husbands and dead children. Like angels grown old but not allowed to die. He could smell them: the odor of candles. — Pete Hamill

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

I had no idea what they were saying in Italian as a child, they spoke too quickly on the radio. But I realized that language was very funny. — Dominic Chianese

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

From the distance of England the Italian cuisine seems to be all things to all people. It does not expect you to bend to its rigor, like the French. It is not rough and boisterous like the Spanish. It is soft and feminine and is adored in the highest circles, though it is not above a degree of prostitution too. But first and foremost it is kind to children. Consider the pizza: all around the world the pizza has come to represent the deepest form of security known to the human palate. It is like a smiling face: it assuages the fear of complexity by showing everything on its surface. — Rachel Cusk

Antonio stepped into Pax's path and said, in English, "Go back to Lazarus and tell him we'll settle whatever claim he has on Sara. She is Baldoni. Ours. Run tell him that, figlio di puttana."
"He's not from Lazarus," she snapped.
"All the better," Antonio said. "Nothing to stop me from cutting his bollocks off."
"You will leave his bollocks precisely as they are."
"I am your closest male relation - "
"You are my closest male idiot. No-one removes any man's balls on my behalf. I will do whatever castrating is necessary among my acquaintance."
"Children," Uncle Bernadro said midly, "he speaks Italian. — Joanna Bourne

I lived in a plenty tough neighborhood. When somebody called me a 'dirty little Guinea', there was only one thing to do-break his head. When I got older, I realized that you shouldn't do it that way. I realized that you've got to do it through education. Children are not to blame. It is the parents. How can a child know whether his playmate is an Italian, a Jew or Irish, unless the parents have discussed it in the privacy of their homes. — Frank Sinatra

It was hard not to feel resentment that men weren't forced into these choices. Some days she felt that she would spend all her time trying to forget her life before children because she loved them too much to be reminded of the heat of Rome in the summer and a beautiful girl who turned heads as she walked down an Italian strada. — Whitney Otto

I took Eugene Sue's Arthur from the reading-room. It's indescribable, enough to make you vomit. You have to read this to realize the pitifulness of money, success, and the public. Literature has become consumptive. It spits and slobbers, covers its blisters with salve and sticking-plaster, and has grown bald from too much hair-slicking. It would take Christ of art to cure this leper. — Gustave Flaubert

And when her biographer says of an Italian woman poet, 'during some years her Muse was intermitted,' we do not wonder at the fact when he casually mentions her ten children. — Anna Garlin Spencer

I had a son in 1976. When I went to Europe, I met an Italian and we became friends. We would talk about what we would tell our families to do if the balloon went up. The conversation
strange and perhaps pathological as it was
bound us together. It was not war, it was not peace, but it was a place in the mind where the preparation for war and the anxiety that it generated created strange forms, such as plans for the movement of children in order to avoid a nuclear holocaust. — George Friedman

We have three children. I've finally mastered Italian. I've personally overseen charities here and in Italy for all of them and still I'm the dog. However, it does not bother me in the least ... because you are the master of me. My mind, my body, my heart. Mel, you control all of it, all the time. — J.J. McAvoy

Italian as a language, she thinks, suits children with its singsong cadences and rising lingering inflections, its quick swinging gait and easy adaptability to argument, to passionate outbursts. — Glenn Haybittle

He was distressed to learn that the Pottery Barn Kids gift registry did not extend to children's books in Italian or Yiddish. — Sylvain Reynard

The weary Italian woman nodded at her children behind her. "Where we came from, everybody lives only one kind of life. Alessandro said he wanted his children to choose the life, not the life to choose the children. And also," she added, panting, slowing down and wiping her brow, "he said America is the only place in the world where even the poor can be smart. — Paullina Simons

The Italians are called "Children of the Sun". They might better be called "Children of the Shadow". Their souls are dark and nocturnal. — D.H. Lawrence

I was a reader before I was a writer, and when I started putting together my first collection of short stories, Fairytales For Lost Children, I drew on my rich history as a reader to try and create my voice. I wanted this voice to reflect my Somali background, my Kenyan upbringing and my London home. This voice would be a mashup of all the elements that formed my youth; the sticky-sweet Jamaican patois, the Kenyan street slang, my Somali and Italian linguistic tics, my love of jazz poetics and nineties hip-hop slanguistics. This language would form the bed on which my narratives of love, loss, identity and hope would rest. — Diriye Osman

And if you ever - and I do mean ever - try to leave me, I'm goin' with you. — Catherine Anderson

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

Today's future is tomorrow's yesterday. — Neil Gaiman

I knew real show business from my father, who had been an actor since he left the world of boxing. — James Earl Jones

I always, always liked children ... I was very afraid of them before. Because I never really grew up, I mean, with a lot of little kids around. Even though I am from a kind of Italian family, I never really grew up with a lot of little kids around. — Steve Burns

Does anybody honestly believe that human progress originates in the composite brain of the majority and not in the brain of the individual personality? Or may it be presumed that for the future human civilization will be able to dispense with this as a condition of its existence? But may it not be that, to-day, more than ever before, the creative brain of the individual is indispensable? — Adolf Hitler

[She] knew there were women who worked successfully out of the home. They ran businesses, created empires and managed to raise happy, healthy, well-adjusted children who went on to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard or became world-renowned concert pianists. Possibly both.
These women accomplished all this while cooking gourmet meals, furnishing their homes with Italian antiques, giving clever, intelligent interviews with Money magazine and People, and maintaining a brilliant marriage with an active enviable sex life and never tipping the scale at an ounce over their ideal weight ...
She knew those women were out there. If she'd had a gun, she'd have hunted every last one of them down and shot them like rabid dogs for the good of womankind. — Nora Roberts

My father's best friend, Georgie Terra, was an Italian guy. The children and the cousins and nieces and nephews were children of the Mafia. Those were the children he grew up with. If you want to go to a safe neighborhood, go to where the Mafia is. — Louis Gossett Jr.

Ian!" she cried, afraid to believe it. "I don't want you to ever regret that you married me."
He smiled, and his fingertips caressed her cheeks. "Regret it? How could I?" You are my passionate
Italian wife. You are the woman who is going to give me children and whose bed I intend to sleep in
every night. You're the reason I'll wake up every morning with a smile on my face. I love you, I will be in
love with you every day of my life, and the only day I'm leaving you is the day they put me in the ground. — Laura Lee Guhrke

Bambini!" Uncle Monty cried out from the front door. "Come along, bambini!"
The Baudelaire orphans raced back through the hedges to where their new guardian was waiting for them. "Violet, Uncle Monty," Violet said. "My name is Violet, my brother's is Klaus, and Sunny is our baby sister. None of us is named Bambini."
"'Bambini' is the Italian word for 'children,'" Uncle Monty explained. "I had a sudden urge to speak a little Italian. I'm so excited to have you three here with me, you're lucky I'm not speaking gibberish. — Lemony Snicket

We soon got the idea that 'Italian' meant something inferior, and a barrier was erected between children of Italian origin and their parents. This was the accepted process of Americanization," Covello reflected in his memoir The Heart Is the Teacher. "We were becoming Americans by learning how to be ashamed of our parents. — Maria Laurino

Children and fried food; the more you make, the better they come out. — Francine Segan