| 1. | Elephants don’t know anything about the world of ants; the peaks of mountains are oblivious of what is happening on the plains! |
| 2. | But just one gram of suspicion weighs heavier than a kilo of truth! |
| 3. | A very long year spent without writing anything by a writer is no different from a moment wasted away from the water by a fish! |
| 4. | No fiction can be superior to and more attractive than the truths themselves! |
| 5. | When God is writing our fate, he uses our blood as ink, if you ask me; and we act out whatever is written in our blood! We are God’s puppets! |
| 6. | Even if the invisible wind stepped into mud, it would leave traces behind; even the fog, which has no body, has its own footmarks: While walking like a white-shrouded ghost in the silence of the night or in the dusk of the morning, it leaves crystal dews on the flowers and grass! |
| 7. | The best thing about hell is that there are no priests there! |
| 8. | A wealthy man can only be swindled with a high price! |
| 9. | I owe all my knowledge to the German inventor, Johannes Gutenberg! |
| 10. | When you look into a well from above, you can’t see anything; you have to go down into the well itself. |
| 11. | A deer that knows all the hunting techniques of a lion will never fall prey to a lion! |
| 12. | Even the most horrible nightmares come to an end one day!.. Just like the good days, bad days are also transitory, Catherine! |
| 13. | A person cannot choose love, love chooses a person. |
| 14. | Our hearts are not like those docile horses we can hold the reins of and drive in any direction we wish; they are like wild horses, without bridles on and free; we have no way of knowing what they will be doing or where they will be running! |
| 15. | Nobody is “superior” to anybody else, only “different”, that is all! |
| 16. | Stupidity is contagious, isn’t that so? Loneliness is a kind of quarantine against stupidity; it’s an effective antidote! |
| 17. | Each person chooses a certain way to forget his or her sufferings, Gregory, and I’ve chosen to make myself suffer, to torture myself! |
| 18. | When I come back from the rough seas, I look for calm lakes I can walk on quietly; a knight who has got tired of riding a wild horse takes great pleasure from sitting on a scabby mule! |
| 19. | The night definitely makes one free!.. The night does not have thousands of curious eyes as the day has! One is under much less control during the nights. |
| 20. | A human being can live without water for a week as a camel does in the desert; but he can never live without lies for one week! What is the greatest invention of mankind, Malaparte? Fire? The black iron plough? Or is it the wheel? No, no! None of these things: Our most magnificent invention, our best servant is the “lie”! |
| 21. | A man drowns in the sea and fish die on land; it is really stupid to go beyond some limits without having certain characteristics! |
| 22. | Big secrets are like contagious diseases; they spread very rapidly. What two men know should never be known by a third person; or a fourth, and after him a fifth will follow! |
| 23. | You must make yourself prepared to eating a desert by putting salt on it and to rowing your boat in the black storm that comes after a sunny journey! |
| 24. | The student is an empty glass, Malaparte; the teacher fills him up carefully, and when it is full he starts looking for a new glass, a teacher has nothing to do with a full glass! |
| 25. | I may be a dwarf in terms of my size, but I have a giant-size intelligence! One has to waste others so as not to waste himself! |
| 26. | I think of happiness as water, my lady! As something clear, clean and beautiful. But it is something ever moving, very fluid; it can slip away from our hands any moment! It has great powers of transforming itself: it can turn into vapour and disappear in front of our very eyes, just like water does! No chains can be put on human happiness; can you put chains on water? |
| 27. | There are so many stars shining in the sky, so many beautiful things winking at you, but when Venus comes out, all the others are waned, they are pushed to the background. |
| 28. | Each woman can grow her nails when she wants to fight! |
| 29. | You can’t have a decent society before you have picked out the stones from among the rice! |
| 30. | Dreams! Fantasies!.. These are nothing but broken pieces of glass; glass gets crashed with the first stone that hits it! |
| 31. | Changeability! That cursed changeability of things! I can’t stand this crazy changeability of life any more. Why isn’t that dazzling light called happiness be as constant as the North Star? |
| 32. | I feel dizzy; just now I am standing at the edge of a deep cliff. One should either be very far from the cliff or at the bottom of it; it is real torture to be standing on its edge like I am doing now! |