Sicilians Quotes & Sayings

That's where they found the skeletons. Right where you're standing. — Teresa Flavin

On the road of experience, join in the living day; if there's an answer, it's just that it is that way. — John Denver

The sweat from his dripping brow. But these slaves - look at them! Some are captured Romans, some Sicilians, many black Libyans, but all are in the last exhaustion, their weary eyelids drooped over their eyes, their lips thick with black crusts, and pink with bloody froth, their arms and backs moving mechanically to the hoarse chant of the overseer. Their bodies of all tints from ivory to jet, are stripped to the waist, and every glistening back shows the angry stripes of the warders. But it is not from these that the blood comes which reddens the seats and tints the salt water washing beneath their manacled — Arthur Conan Doyle

You will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

In all of human history no country or no people have suffered such terrible slavery, conquest and foreign oppression and no country and no people have struggled so strenuously for their emancipation than Sicily and the Sicilians. — Karl Marx

A mad man is thinking because he is not thinking — Udeagha Iwuchukwu Michael

My Brother went to college To become a doctor And if he studies hard enough He'll end up just like papa, who hates his life. — Conor Oberst

[As Garibaldi says,] 'Sleep, my dear Chevalley, sleep, that is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them ... — Frances Mayes

[As Chevalley says,] 'Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect ... — Frances Mayes

The young people I know judge leaders by their deeds and abhor hypocrisy. Inconsistency and point-scoring do not win respect. It's not easy to be engaged in political debate when it is reduced to performers trying to outdo each other. Actions from leaders must mirror the values they claim to espouse. — Alexandra Adornetto

My family was all born in Sicily and I'm Italian-American. They're the real thing. They're authentic Italians, and honestly they're the most open-minded, nicest people in the world and nothing can really offend them. That's the way I think true Sicilians are. — Vinny Guadagnino

In a participatory culture, none of us is fully literate unless we're creating, not just consuming. — Dan Gillmor

The only institution in the Sicilian conscience that really counts is the family; counts, that is to say, more as a dramatic juridical contract or bond than as a natural association based on affection. The family is the Sicilians' State. The State, as it is for us, is extraneous to them, merely a de facto entity based on force; an entity imposing taxes, military service, war, police. Within the family institution the Sicilian can cross the frontier of his own natural tragic solitude and fit into a communal life where relationships are governed by hair-splitting contractual ties. To ask him to cross the frontier between family and State would be too much. In imagination he may be carried away by the idea of the State and may even rise to being Prime Minister; but the precise and definite code of his rights and duties will remain within the family, whence the step towards victorious solitude is shorter. — Leonardo Sciascia

Tell the truth, all Sicilians prefer smelling the shit of their villages to the best perfumes in Paris. What am I doing here? I could have escaped to Brazil like some others. Ah, we love where we are born, we Sicilians, but Sicily does not love us. — Mario Puzo

Sicilians, Calabrians, Neapolitans - there were real differences between them, and then all of a sudden they're all living in the US, and then they're all Italians. — Jonas Carpignano

In Sicily it doesn't matter whether things are done well or done badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of 'doing' at all. — Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different reasons: for money, for fame, for reviewers, for parents, for friends, for loved ones; for vanity, for pride, for curiosity, for amusement: as skilled furniture makers enjoy making furniture, as drunkards like drinking, as judges like judging, as Sicilians like emptying a shotgun into an enemy's back. I could fill a book with reasons, and they would all be true, though not true of all. Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. — John Fowles

So many times, I tried to imagine how he would look like and always ended up believing he is no more than a faceless monster. — Refaat Alareer

You can see the latest dumbness as just the end of a long line of dumbnesses that have been taking place for thousands of years. — J. B. Handelsman

To say my day sucked would be like saying the Sicilians were only mildly intimidating.
FYI, they were terrifying. Many a man shit their pants in their presence and I was living in my own personal hell. — Rachel Van Dyken