Top 59 Sicily Quotes & Sayings

The technical definition of the Holocene has to do with the extinction of a snail species in Sicily.

I never forget my first emotions in football, in Sicily.

Sicily could only be an island, less by the caprice of nature than by her own insolence. As though she might have quit Italy had she not already been born separate from it.

I was born in Messina, Sicily. I stayed there until I was 18 and finished my studies.

I also really loved the sea when I was young, when I lived in Sicily, but unfortunately the sea here has been reduced to a trash dump. It's a horrible pain going to the beach; you risk getting an infection or getting tar all over you.

I'll go to the south of Sicily in the winter, and paint memories of Arles – I'll buy a piano and Mozart me that – I'll write long sad tales about people in the legend of my life – This part is my part of the movie, let's hear yours

I collect church collapses, recreationally. Did you see the recent one in Sicily? Marvelous! The facade fell on sixty-five grandmothers at a special mass. Was that evil? If so, who did it? If he's up there, he just loves it, Officer Starling. Typhoid and swans - it all comes from the same place.

One of my desert island books, 'The Leopard' is not so much a novel as a eulogy for a way of life and a Sicily that was already lost by the time Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was writing.

Who would have thought we would be part of a winning coalition in Molise and Sicily? That we would win in places like Siena, Viterbo, Pisa, and Terni?

My best vacation was renting a boat and motoring along the Adriatic, going along the Croatian coast, before it became so fashionable. I've also sailed around the Turkish islands, the Greek islands and Sicily.

People can't get their heads round the idea of a species surviving; you know, they're more concerned about how you treat a donkey in Sicily or something.

No Southern people ever seem to possess the energy of their Northern brothers, and in Sicily a dolce far niente life is much enjoyed. Time is no object. According to Pliny, Aristhomacus watched the life of the bee carefully for fifty-eight years, which is just the sort of work a Sicilian of to-day would like.

Sicily is more beautiful than any woman.

Being summoned by the Athenians out of Sicily to plead for his life, Alcibiades absconded, saying that that criminal was a fool who studied a defence when he might fly for it.

My father took my mother, me, and my brother from Sicily to New York. He got us one-way tickets but booked himself a return flight. He dumped us with my mother's parents, who had just arrived from Italy, and abandoned us. That was 1986. I didn't see or speak to him for another 12 years. That's cruel.

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.

In Sicily, women are more dangerous than shotguns.

Sicily has suffered 13 foreign dominations from which she has taken both the best and the worst. The sequence of different cultures has made Sicily a fascinating place, quite unlike any other.

My memories of my childhood are wonderful memories. I feel that I was privileged because I grew up in a beautiful city. It is Catania, on the eastern coast of Sicily. It's a place filled with sun, close to the beach.

Who would condescend to strike down the mere things that he does not fear? Who would debase himself to be merely brave, like any common prizefighter? Who would stoop to be fearless--like a tree? Fight the thing that you fear. You remember the old tale of the English clergyman who gave the last rites to the brigand of Sicily, and how on his death-bed the great robber said, 'I can give you no money, but I can give you advice for a lifetime: your thumb on the blade, and strike upwards.' So I say to you, strike upwards, if you strike at the stars.

Three quarters of the American population literally believe in religious miracles. The numbers who believe in the devil, in resurrection, in God doing this and that - it's astonishing. These numbers aren't duplicated anywhere else in the industrial world. You'd have to maybe go to mosques in Iran or do a poll among old ladies in Sicily to get numbers like this. Yet this is the American population.

Nowhere has truth such a short life as in Sicily; a fact has scarcely happened five minutes before its genuine kernel has vanished, been camouflaged, embellished, disfigured, squashed, annihilated by imagination and self interest; shame, fear, generosity, malice, opportunism, charity, all the passions, good as well as evil, fling themselves onto the fact and tear it to pieces; very soon it has vanished altogether.

One usually dies because one is alone, or because one has got into something over one's head. One often dies because one does not have the right alliances, because one is not given support. In Sicily the Mafia kills the servants of the State that the State has not been able to protect.

The Negro is not the man farthest down. The condition of the coloured farmer in the most backward parts of the Southern States of America, even where he has the least education and the least encouragement, is incomparably better than the condition and opportunities of the agricultural population in Sicily.

We built our fashion around three fundamental concepts: Sicily, tailoring, and tradition. Our dream is to create a style which is timeless, and to create clothes with such a strong personality that whoever sees them can instantly say without a shadow of a doubt: this is a Dolce & Gabbana.

I think that my interpretation of Italian was a lot more southern than what my husband cooks. You know, I grew up in Queens and in Brooklyn, and we - really, it's more southern. It's Naples and Sicily. It's heavier. It's over-spiced. And like most Americans, I thought spaghetti and meatballs was genius.

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.

My dad lives in Sicily, so I'm half Italian and half Irish - it's a fiery combination.

Frank Sinatra took me to a whole new planet. I worked with him until he passed away in '98. He left me his ring. I never take it off. Now, when I go to Sicily, I don't need a passport. I just flash my ring.

If you want to propose marriage to your girlfriend and you live in England and she is in Sicily, do the decent thing and walk down there. Travelling by car or aeroplane wouldn't be right at such a moment.

Student journeys which were important to me were Sicily, Greece, and Egypt, where I really saw these buildings, and that is where you're able to grasp what things mean.

Misgovernment is of four kinds, often in combination. They are: 1) tyranny or oppression, of which history provides so many well-known examples that they do not need citing; 2) excessive ambition, such as Athens' attempted conquest of Sicily in the Peloponnesian War, Philip II's of England via the Armada, Germany's twice-attempted rule of Europe by a self-conceived master race, Japan's bid for an empire of Asia; 3) incompetence or decadence, as in the case of the late Roman empire, the last Romanovs and the last imperial dynasty of China; and finally 4) folly or perversity.

The typical WW1 soldier was not an intellectual like Ernst Jünger or Wilfred Owen, but was a peasant draftee from Galicia or Bavaria or Sicily, with all the traditional religious ideas. The hothouse atmosphere of war brought everyone into a supernatural-oriented universe of ghosts and apparitions.

The peasants of Sicily, who have kept their own wheat and make their own natural brown bread, ah, it is amazing how fresh and sweet and clean their loaf seems, so perfumed, as home-made bread used all to be before the war.

I like to collect aprons from different places I go. I first started when I was in Italy because I thought that would be really appropriate. I got a hand-stitched Italian apron from this woman in Sicily who put my name on it, and it said, 'Sicily, Italy.' So now I get one from everywhere I go.

It's just exciting to be able to see what someone around the world is eating in Sicily or Tokyo.

Enough of Sicily being the refugee camp of Europe. I will not stand by and do nothing while there are landings after landings of migrants.

To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is to not have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything.

My grandfather was a chef for a Baron in Sicily before he came to America. I grew up with him. I used to do my homework at one end of the kitchen table while he cooked at the other end.

Sicily is a blessed land. First, because of its geographic position in the Mediterranean. Second, for its history and all the different peoples who have settled there: Arabs, Greeks, Normans, the Swedes. That has made us different from others. We exaggerate, we overdo. We love Greek tragedy. We cry, we fight, sometimes for nothing.

I'm tired and it's taking an increasing amount out of me, more than I have to give physically. And that's why I want to move to Sicily and buy that little farm and raise a flock of goats and geese. I find it peaceful ... and it would be a nice way to end life.

I speak a little bit of Italian, yeah. I understand more than I speak. I speak more of a dialect; my mum's from Naples and my dad's from Sicily, so it comes out little a bit of a cocktail of the Italian language.

All of Sicily is a dimension of the imagination.

But if I were asked to pick one constant, one quality that seems dependable, immutable, endlessly available, I'd say that it was intensity. For nothing in Sicily seems withheld, done half way, restrained or suppressed. There's nothing to correspond to say, the ironic, the cerebral remove at which a Frenchman might consider an idea or a question, or the Scandinavian distrust of the sloppy, emotive response.

We haven't time to spare to hear whether it was between Italy and Sicily that he ran into a storm or somewhere outside the world we know-when every day we're running into our own storms, spiritual storms, and driven by vice into all the troubles that Ulysses ever knew.

One of the biggest dishes in Sicily is couscous, and there's always been a North African influence on Italian culture, culinary culture there.

The first (barbers) that entered Italy came out of Sicily and it was in the 454 yeare after the foundation of Rome. Brought in they were by P. Ticinius Mena as Verra doth report for before that time they never cut their hair. The first that was shaven every day was Scipio Africanus, and after cometh Augustus the Emperor who evermore used the razor.

I don't know why legal immigration even exists anymore when I can just put on some bronzer, get on a dingy boat, and just show up at the beaches of Sicily with the Koran in my hand.

Cornwall bears a certain resemblance to Italy: each is like a leg or boot, but Italy stands a-tiptoe to the south, whereas Cornwall is thrust out to the west. But, whereas Italy is kicking Sicily as a football, Cornwall has but the shattered group of the Scilly Isles at its toe.

I rented a house in Favignana, off the coast of Sicily, in the mid or late '90s. There was a revolving door of visiting friends and family - we played games, painted our faces, went swimming naked, cooked big meals, rode around on motorini, and had great cappuccinos.

The failure of Christianity in the areas west from Sicily was even greater, and was increased by the spread of Arab outlooks and influence to that area, and especially to Spain.

Were a man to spend only one day in Sicily and ask, "What must one see?" I would answer him without hesitation, "Taormina." It is only a landscape, but a landscape where you find everything on earth that seems made to seduce the eyes, the mind and the imagination.

What makes these special Beaujolais attractive is the same thing that has always made Beaujolais attractive: the price. Given the insane prices of so many wines right now, Beaujolais and the delicious wines pouring in from southern Italy and Sicily keep many wine drinkers from switching to iced tea.

I come from a small village in Sicily. For all Italian people, family is very important. We don't fight with our families.

Sometimes, if you want to be happy, you've got to run away to Bath and marry a punk rocker. Sometimes you've got to dye your hair cobalt blue, or wander remote islands in Sicily, or cook your way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year, for no very good reason.

My friend told me he was going to a fancy-dress party as an Italian island. I said: 'Don’t be Sicily’.

I had to inspect all fighter units in Russia, Africa, Sicily, France, and Norway. I had to be everywhere.

I hate and detest Sicily in so far as I love it, and in so far as it does not respond to the kind of love I would like to have for it.

We feel a special bond with Sicily and its people - in fact, our first campaigns were shot in Sicily, like the one shot in Vucciria Sicilian historical market We enjoyed showing the faces and the characters that crowd that beautiful market every day.