Quotes & Sayings About Venice

Venice is the worlds unconscious: a misers glittering hoard, guarded by a Beast whose eyes are made of white agate, and by a saint who is really a prince who has just slain a dragon. — Mary McCarthy

Venice, Italy, survives 365 days out of every year in water; New Orleans can survive a few days of water if it has to. — Billy Tauzin

The experts are right, he thought. Venice is sinking. The whole city is slowly dying. One day the tourists will travel here by boat to peer down into the waters, and they will see pillars and columns and marble far, far beneath them, slime and mud uncovering for brief moments a lost underworld of stone. Their heels made a ringing sound on the pavement and the rain splashed from the gutterings above. A fine ending to an evening that had started with brave hope, with innocence. ("Don't Look Now") — Daphne Du Maurier

Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go. — Truman Capote

It took Feyra some time to realise that she was not delirious: the citizens were wearing painted masks.From childhood she had heard the legend that the Venetians were half human, half beast.She knew that this could not be true, but in the swirling fog of this hellish city she almost believed it. The creatures seemed to stare at her down their warped noses from their blank and hollow eyes. And overlord of all was the winged lion - he was everywhere, watching from every plaque or pennant, ubiquitous and threatening. — Marina Fiorato

Anywhere you want. Any time you want. One condition - it has to be amazing. — Toby Whithouse

I am like a caricature of myself, and I like that. It is like a mask. And for me the Carnival of Venice lasts all year long. — Karl Lagerfeld

All this cut-price transcendentalism does not prevent California from being a startlingly physical state. This becomes most obvious where Los Angeles saunters down to the sea. The region is called Venice. — Quentin Crisp

There is still one of which you never speak.'
Marco Polo bowed his head.
'Venice,' the Khan said.
Marco smiled. 'What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?'
The emperor did not turn a hair. 'And yet I have never heard you mention that name.'
And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice. — Italo Calvino

If it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. — William Shakespeare

Living in Venice, it's hard to determine the real parody of inhumanity. On the one hand, there are the homeless hordes, a teaming mass of virtual zombies swelling the streets whose daily business amounts to ruffling through trash, pissing on corners and chasing pets. On the other hand, there is the endless stream of bourgeois stiffs coming and going from home, restaurants and shops. They are zombies in their own right who pretend the homeless don't exist. — Ryan Hyatt

Venice appeared to me as in a recurring dream, a place once visited and now fixed in memory like images on a photographer's plates so that my return was akin to turning the leaves of a portfolio: a scene of the gondolas moored by the railway station; the Grand Canal in twilight; the Rialto bridge; the Piazza San Marco; the shimmering, rippling wonderland; the bustling water traffic; the fish market; the Lido beach and boardwalk; Teeny in the launch; the singing, gesturing gondoliers; the bourgeois tourists drinking coffee at Florian's; the importunate beggars; the drowned girl's ghost haunting the Bridge of Sighs; the pigeons, mosquitoes and fetor of decay. — Gary Inbinder

If there were not a bridge from Venice to Europe, Europe would be an island — John Berendt

They are sick that surfeit with too much, as they that starve with nothing. — William Shakespeare

I have long believed that celebrity, the way we worship and package and sell our pop stars, is what filled the need for gods that was once filled by the pictures in stained glass. Hollywood is post-Christian Venice - in other words, a pantheon of saints without the hassle and heartache of religion. — Rich Cohen

When the waiter brought the cheese-board, there was a large carrot carved in the shape of a mermaid sitting between the Dolcelatte and the Pecorino. Teo could have sworn that the carrot-mermaid flexed her tail and plunged her little hand inside a smelly Gorgonzola. 'Tyromancy, ye know,' remarked the mermaid. 'The Ancient Art of Divination by Cheese.' Then she pulled her tiny hand out and inspected the green cheese-mold on her tiny fingers. 'Lackaday!' she moaned. 'Stinking! It goes poorly for Venice and Teodora, it do! — Michelle Lovric

I think the best grace of wit will shortly turn into silence, and discourse grow commendable in none only but parrots. — William Shakespeare

The way London carries on about the Thames you'd think it was a big deal, including lining it with all their classiest buildings, such as Parliament. San Francisco, the wind-up toy of cities, never gets over its Bay, and Venice is so much in love with its Bay that it's sinking into it. New York is full — Donald E. Westlake

Now, infidel, I have you on the hip! — William Shakespeare

You take my life when you do take the means whereby I live — William Shakespeare

Today, there are more people of Irish ancestry in the United States than in Ireland, more Jews than in Israel, more blacks than in most African countries. There are more people of Polish ancestry in Detroit than in most of the leading cities in Poland, and more than twice as many people of Italian ancestry in New York as in Venice. — Thomas Sowell

Paris is an ideal place to become informed, while Venice is a place to think and write. — Pontus Hulten

I'm feeling full of tiny princes, bustling to get out into the world and start plotting against one another. — Christopher Moore

Just as we will spend large sums to preserve cities like Venice, even though future generations conceivably may not be interested in such architectural treasures, so we should preserve wilderness even though it is possible that future generations will care little for it. — Peter Singer

The things of this world reveal their essential absurdity when they are put in the Venetian context. In the unreal realm of the canals, as in a Swiftian Lilliput, the real world, with its contrivances, appears as a vast folly. — Mary McCarthy

Tokyo is too close up to see, sometimes. There are no distances and everything is above your head - dentists, kindergartens, dance studios. Even the roads and walkways are up on murky stilts. An evil-twin Venice with all the water drained away. — David Mitchell

Coming to Hollywood at 19 and living in a single apartment with one other guy on Venice Beach was a massive contrast to my upbringing. — David A.R. White

We danced our youth in a dreamed of city, Venice, paradise, proud and pretty, We lived for love and lust and beauty, Pleasure then our only duty. Floating them twixt heaven and Earth And drank on plenties blessed mirth We thought ourselves eternal then, Our glory sealed by God's own pen. But paradise, we found is always frail, Against man's fear will always fail. — Veronica Franco

An outlaw gulch, a haven for draft resisters, struggling artists, and drug addicts ... a camp for semi-demented adults ... Venice is like the legendary Phoenix - it always seems to rise again from the ashes. — Sara Davidson

A realist, in Venice, would become a romantic by mere faithfulness to what he saw before him. — Arthur Symons

When the nuns came to be blessed by the Patriarch, who on special holy days, went by my house in a motorboat, I detached the phallus of the horseman and hid it in a drawer. I also did this on certain days when I had to receive stuffy visitors, but occasionally I forgot, and when confronted with this phallus found myself in great embarrassment. The only thing to do in such cases was to ignore it. In Venice a legend spread that I had several phalluses of different sizes, like spare parts, which I used on different occasions. — Peggy Guggenheim

As they rolled over the marshes before Venice, he fell back in his seat, windburnt and exhausted, and noticed that the bottle of water, but for its slight and elegant blue tint, was the smoothest, clearest, and most transparent thing he had ever seen. All that was reflected in it was sharp, subdued, and calm. The fields outside, beyond the reeds; the reeds themselves, waving green and yellow; the water, shockingly blue in north light, were clarified, compressed, and preserved within the lens. And if bottles of mineral water could pacify the light of mountains, fields, and the sea, to what painful mysteries would the lens of beauty be opaque? Even death, Alessandro thought, would yield to beauty - if not in fact then in explanation - for the likeness of every great question could be found in forms as simple as songs, and there, if not explicable, they were at least perfectly apprehensible. — Mark Helprin

I love Santa Monica and Venice because I like the beach. I have a lot of friends in that area. — Denis Leary

The classical allusions and the Platonic disquisitions on beauty are no longer a form of cover, but integral to Aschenbach's complex sexuality. Moreover, the wandering around Venice in pursuit of Tadzio isn't a prelude to some sexual contact for which Aschenbach is yearning. — Philip Kitcher

Venice is like doing acid. If you can't take it with you after you either come down or move away, you were never really there in the first place. — Anne Alexander

New England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice, not Milan while the American empire careens onward toward its unpredicted end ... It is the first American section to be finished to achieve stability in the conditions of its life. It is the first old civilization, the first permanent civilization in America. — Bernard DeVoto

I shall be an Attila to Venice. — Napoleon Bonaparte

I think people prefer to remember happy times, well, happier times, and if they can't remember them, then to change the memories and make them happier. — Donna Leon

Wells?" Someone was prodding his arm. "Hey, Wells?" Wells's eyes snapped open, draining the last droplets of a dream from his mind. He'd been floating down a canal in Venice. No, wait, he'd been riding a horse into battle alongside Napoleon. Kendall — Kass Morgan

The perennial wonder of Venice is to peer at herself in her canals and find that she exists-incredible as it seems. It is the same reassurance that a looking-glass offers us: the guarantee that we are real. — Mary McCarthy

I usually like to throw on some flip flops and go to a really nice lunch in Venice, or Santa Monica, or stay in and cook dinner. — Ben Savage

I have an Italian comedy at the Venice Film Festival. — Robert Englund

My favourite setting is Italy, specifically Venice, because it is there that I met my husband, who is Venetian. I used it as the setting for Virtue and Vice, Enchantment in Venice, and Seduced by Innocence. Apart from Venice, my favourite city is Rome. — Lucy Gordon

Mann's Death in Venice actually contains a snippet of philosophy about the second question, when Aschenbach, collapsed in the plaza, engages in his quasi-Socratic, anti-Socratic, ruminations. — Philip Kitcher

Venice once was dear,
The pleasant place of all festivity,
The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy. — Lord Byron

Part of my methodological approach is made explicit when I discuss ways in which literature can have philosophical significance. Literature doesn't typically argue - and when it does, it's deadly dull. But literature can supply the frame within which we come to observe and reason, or it can change our frame in highly significant ways. That's one of the achievements I'd claim for Mann, and for Death in Venice. — Philip Kitcher

I sat with my toes buried in the warm yellow sand staring out towards the back door of The East. Pacific Ocean Blue was playing in the background and it had left me in a state of Bohemia as the waves crashed ashore; roaring as loud as lions. — David Louden

The two had been together since they were little girls, and so loved and hated each other like sisters. — Christopher Moore

What silliness that we must consider the proper order of milk and tea when pouring a cup."
Callie swallowed back a laugh. "I suppose you do not place much stock in such ceremony in Venice?"
"No. It is liquid. It is warm. It is not coffee. Why worry?" Juliana's smile flashed, showing a dimple in her cheek.
"Why indeed?" Callie said, wondering, fleetingly, if Juliana's brothers had such an endearing trait.
"Do not be concerned," Juliana held up a hand dramatically. "I shall endeavor to remember tea first, milk second. I should hate to cause another war between Britain and the Continent."
Callie laughed, accepting a cup of perfectly poured tea from the younger woman. "I am certain that Parliament will thank you for your diplomacy. — Sarah MacLean

There were two practical reasons we moved to Venice. One was that there was an artists movement and a countercultural movement. Lots of people we might want to hire lived in the area. We also wanted to buy in a lower rent area that looked like it was going to be gentrified so that we could eventually sell the studio for more money. — Roger Corman

I loved going surfing down on Venice Beach. I'd go out with a board under my arm and think, 'I can't do that in Cranhill.' — Billy Boyd

Could any State on Earth Immortall be,
Venice by Her rare Goverment is She;
Venice Great Neptunes Minion, still a Mayd,
Though by the warrlikst Potentats assayed;
Yet She retaines Her Virgin-waters pure,
Nor any Forren mixtures can endure;
Though, Syren-like on Shore and Sea, Her Face
Enchants all those whom once She doth embrace,
Nor is ther any can Her bewty prize
But he who hath beheld her with his Eyes:
Those following Leaves display, if well observed,
How she long Her Maydenhead preserved,
How for sound prudence She still bore the Bell;
Whence may be drawn this high-fetchd parallel,
Venus and Venice are Great Queens in their degree,
Venus is Queen of Love, Venice of Policie. — James Howell

It's a fault line where the flotsam and energy that washes up from the Pacific collides with all of urban America crashing in from the other direction. — Antoine Predock

[On Venice:] Every hour of the day is a miracle of light. In summer with daybreak the rising sun produces such a tender magic on the water that it nearly breaks one's heart. — Peggy Guggenheim

Even though the sewer pipelines reach far into our houses with their tentacles, they are carefully hidden from view and we are happily ignorant of the invisible Venice of shit underlying our bathrooms, bedrooms, dance halls, and parliaments. — Milan Kundera

General Grant seriously remarked to a particularly bright young woman that Venice would be a fine city if it were drained. — Henry Adams

We didn't stow away!" Dan protested. "You sunk our boat and pulled us out of the canal!"
"Good point," Ian agreed. "Return them to the canal. Roughly, please. — Gordon Korman

He was aware for the first time of how quiet the city had gotten. After dark the streets and canals seemed to empty out. As if Venice felt less of an obligation to pretend to be part of this millennium at night, and had reverted to its medieval self again. — Lev Grossman

I knew suddenly that I could not endure another week in Venice, not another day of their gentle melancholy, not another hour of fashionable despair. — Bruce Sterling

Everything was happening all the time. You never needed television. — Barbet Schroeder

I have written movies that won prizes at Cannes and Venice. — Luciano Vincenzoni

WHEN WE EVENTUALLY ARRIVED in Venice late in the afternoon, we had to park the car in a large lot before we were allowed to enter the town itself, because Venice doesn't have a single proper street. — Jostein Gaarder

I cannot write about Venice; I can only write about me, and the sleeping parts of myself that Venice has shocked into wakefulness. — Jessica Zafra

For me, the idea of being a successful actor is hanging out with my dogs and my boy, down in Venice beach, and going, "I don't have to audition today. I've got a little respite here." — Robert Knepper

Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes. — Mary McCarthy

In the journey of the year, the autumn is Venice, spring is Naples, certainly, and the majestic maturity of summer is Rome. — George William Curtis

Bodybuilders party a lot, and once, in Gold's
the gym in Venice, California, where all the top guys train there was a black girl who came out naked. Everybody jumped on her and took her upstairs, where we all got together. — Arnold Schwarzenegger

The weakest kind of fruit drops earliest to the ground. — William Shakespeare

I can cope with, and even somehow enjoy, the sinking melancholy of Venice, just for a few days. Somewhere in me I am able to recognize that this is not my melancholy; this is the city's own indigenous melancholy, and I am healthy enough these days to be able to feel the difference between me and it. This is a sign, I cannot help but think, of healing, of the coagulation of my self. There were a few years there, lost in borderless despair, when I used to experience all the world's sadness as my own. Everything sad leaked through me and left damp traces behind. — Elizabeth Gilbert

At 6 p.m. I stood in the doorway of my studio facing the Venice boardwalk. A few spectators watched as I pushed two live electric wires into my chest. The wires crossed and exploded, burning me but saving me from electrocution. — Chris Burden

Though justice be Thy plea, consider this: That in the course of justice none of us should see salvation. We do pray for mercy, And that same prayer doth teach us all to render The deeds of mercy. — George Bernard Shaw

Vegetables cooked for salads should always be on the crisp side, like those trays of zucchini and slender green beans and cauliflowerets in every trattoria in Venice, in the days when the Italians could eat correctly. You used to choose the things you wanted: there were tiny potatoes in their skins, remember, and artichokes boiled in olive oil, as big as your thumb, and much tenderer ... and then the waiter would throw them all into an ugly white bowl and splash a little oil and vinegar over them, and you would have a salad as fresh and tonic to your several senses as La Primavera. It can still be done, although never in the same typhoidic and enraptured air. You can still find little fresh vegetables, and still know how to cook them until they are not quite done, and chill them, and eat them in a bowl. — Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

There is a big difference between The Merchant of Venice and a photograph of two males of different races in an erotic pose on a marble table top. — Jesse Helms

Decay and disfavor came together as other parts of the coast were developed, and the canals became weed-clogged ditches breeding mosquitoes, and the hotels were turned into third-rate apartments. — Edward Bunker

I believe it was God's will that we should come back, so that men might know the things that are in the world, since, as we have said in the first chapter of this book, no other man, Christian or Saracen, Mongol or pagan, has explored so much of the world as Messer Marco, son of Messer Niccolo Polo, great and noble citizen of the city of Venice. — Marco Polo

We're not just making 'Marco Polo,' we're living it. Because we traveled to Venice ... Kazakhstan ... into the jungles of Malaysia. — John Fusco

City of rest! - as it seems to our modern senses, - how is it possible that so busy, so pitiless and covetous a life as history shows us, should have gone to the making and the fashioning of Venice! — Mary Augusta Ward

Venissa is a perfect destination for day-trippers from Venice proper who are searching for great food and a little adventure; it's a 30-minute jaunt by vaporetto from St. Mark's, quicker by water taxi. — Roger Morris

As many times as I've seen 'The Merchant of Venice,' I always take Shylock's side. For all the hatred that guy is shown, he has a reason to hate in return. He's treated cruelly. And it's tragic that he learns to be intolerant because of what others do to him. — John Irving

A splendour of miscellaneous spirits. — John Ruskin

Gratiano speakes an infinite deale of nothing, more then any man in all Venice, his reasons are two graines of wheate hid in two bushels of chaffe: you shall seeke all day ere you finde them, & when you haue them they are not worth the search — William Shakespeare

Listen," whispers Dario. "How still it is." They stand under a darkened archway, the only sound a whispered squeak where docked gondolas rub against each other. Negative ions from the lapping water release serotonin, and the brains of these two flood with the nourishment of each other's breath, each other's chi. — Kristen Caven

Nellie grinned. "I always wanted to go to Venice. It's supposed to be the romance capital of the world."
"Sweet," put in Dan. "Too bad your date is an Egyptian Mau on a hunger strike."
The au pair sighed. "Better than an eleven-year-old with a big mouth. — Gordon Korman

Beyond this point on the river Cambridge became a kind of miniature Venice, its river water lapping up against the ancient stone of college walls, here mottled and reddened brick, there white stone. Stained, lichened, softened by water light. Here the river became a great north-south tunnel, a gothic castle from the river, flanked by locked iron gates, steps leading nowhere, labyrinths, trapdoors, landing stages where barges had unloaded their freight: crates of fine wines, flour, oats, candles, fine meats carried into the damp darkness of college cellars. — Rebecca Stott

Bad luck that my first glimpse of Venice was marred by an insult. — Beverle Graves Myers

I like fire and water. You are lucky to have both right here."
From " Desperate Pursuit in Venice" Chapter Two. Kataryna's response to Luca. — Karynne Summars

Venice was and is full of lost places where people put up for sale the last worn bits of their souls, hoping no one will buy. — Ray Bradbury

Hanging and wiving goes by destiny. — William Shakespeare

We drove slowly, neither of us speaking, and worked our way out of the Marina, up through Venice, and along the beach. It was automatic driving, going through the motions without conscious thought or direction, movement without destination or design. Pike hunkered low in the passenger's seat, his face dark in the bright sun, his dark lenses somehow molten and angry. It is not good to see Joe Pike angry. Better to see a male lion charge at close quarters. Better to hear someone scream, Incoming! — Robert Crais

As I read Mann in German for the first time, the full achievement - both literary and philosophical - of Death in Venice struck me forcefully, so that, when I was invited to give the Schoff Lectures at Columbia, the opportunity to reflect on the contrasts between novella and opera seemed irresistible. — Philip Kitcher

Venice is beautiful, but like a Bergman movie is beautiful; you can admire it, but you don't really want to live in it. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Venice, Italy, is one of my favorite cities, a place I've been lucky enough to visit twice. — Rosecrans Baldwin

Turning her body slightly to the left, he gently bends her knee, breaking eye contact to lick her slowly, from Venice to Trieste - then down the Croatian Coast, the length of Serenissima. — Kristen Caven

When my film went to the Venice Film Festival and won the best script writing, the jury [prize], it didn't go to my head. I know how many black filmmakers that I am operating with whose name will never be mentioned. But I'm part of them in that silent existence. — Haile Gerima

'The Merchant of Venice' is a straightforward, clear story, while 'The Winter's Tale,' as a general rule, is hard to present because there is so much plot. — Jesse L. Martin

I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits. — Evelyn Waugh

I moved into a nice houseboat in Little Venice when I was 15 years old. I found a girlfriend called Monday and a houseboat called Friday, so I had the week sewn up. — Richard Branson

Maybe I had been making a greater monster of him than he really was, or maybe I was still under his influence, for I was certain that he wanted me to believe he was no more than a harmless man who happened to use vampirism to get what he desired. Some remnant of his mesmerism was still upon me. I had never been able to shake the feeling that he was tucked away in a corner of my mind, that he could read my thoughts, know what I was thinking. He had done something to me, but what that was, I had never been able to discover. All I knew was that the feeling had been with me since the morning I woke up and found myself in Venice. — Melika Dannese Lux

Amsterdam was a great surprise to me. I had always thought of Venice as the city of canals; it had never entered my mind that I should find similar conditions in a Dutch town. — James Weldon Johnson

Kerrigan?" she tried again.
"Aye, Lady Mouse. I am here."
Relieved, she smiled at the sound of his voice in her head. During the day, he was oft silent. But at night ... at night he would speak softly to her and tell her of his travels through time as he eluded those who were after him.
"Where are you today, my lord?"
"I'm in Venice, during a carnival. It's beautiful here. There are minstrels and acrobats all around. Plenty of places to hide from Morgen and her spies."
"You are safe?"
"Aye, Lady Mouse. I am always safe. But I've no wish to talk about me. How are you doing?"
"I miss you."
She swore she could feel his pain as well as her own.
"I miss you as well and I think of you constantly."
-Kerrigan and Seren communicating though their thoughts as they were apart. — Kinley MacGregor