Paolo Cognetti Quotes

“A man cannot understand certain things. Here we have a little girl who discovers the existence of sex and stops eating. Without knowing it, she does the right thing, given that anorexia interrupts the menstrual cycle. But the question isn't: why doesn't Lucia want to become a woman? This one is easy, every little girl knows the answer. The real question is: why don't they all do it?”

“As soon as we are born, we instinctively scream, and it takes us forever to learn to listen.”

“In writing there is no teacher to explain where you are wrong and it can be a long time before you find out for yourself.”

“Literature does not arise from what we know, but from what we don't know. Which attracts us. Which haunts us. that we want to know.”

“We are the stories we tell, whoever listens to them certifies our existence. We are our repertoire of stories, no matter if true or invented, and we exchange them as a gift.”

“You don't catch them, fish, if you don't have the courage to go where they are.”

“But is courage a thing you learn? Or is one just born with it? Is it possible that I'm afraid of everything?”

“Do you know what birth is? It's a ship going to war.”

“Dwell, dress, habit. It's all stuff we put on, all of our protective layers.”

“Families were like submarines under fire from random misfortunes, depth charges dropped from the heavens high in a naval battle between you and the inscrutable will of God.”

“I've been reading the Bible from cover to cover lately. I don't believe in God but it seemed like an important book to read, at least to prevent someone else from reading it for me and trying to explain it to me.”

“Intelligence is not knowing how to do, it is knowing how to learn.”

“It's not your actions, but your reactions that define who you are. When things go well, everyone is good. It's when they go wrong that you see what stuff you're made of.”

“The important thing, he said, is getting used to a face: not beauty but habit. After all, what is beauty, a stupid geometric question, just a lucky joint in the collection of mouths, noses and ears available. But if you've come to know a face, and you've seen it when it's sleepy, when it has a cold, when it's destroyed by a bad day, if you've gotten used to that face, then you've overcome the question of beauty, don't you agree?”

“Then your Hell must be like this. A place where you always get lost.”

“Without death there would be no need to pray or go to church, to obey anyone older than you, not to swear and lie. But since you have to die, the problem becomes figuring out where you'll end up next. Hell or Heaven.”

“A place you loved as a kid can also look completely different to you as an adult and turn out to be a disappointment; or it can remind you of what you are no longer and make you feel very sad.”

“And he said: it's you from the city who call it nature. She is so abstract in your head that even the name is abstract. Here we say forest, pasture, stream, rock, things that one can point with the finger. Things you can use. If you can't use them, we don't give them a name because they're useless.”

“As they say: sometimes you have to take a step backwards in order to move forwards. That is, if you have the humility to admit it to yourself.”

“Back up here after a long time. It would be nice to stay there all together, without seeing anyone anymore, without having to go down to the valley.”

“By now I'd learned to ask the grown-up questions, where you ask one thing to find out another.”

“Did the one who went around the eight mountains, or who reached the top of Mount Sumeru, learned more?”

“From my father I had learned, long after I had stopped following him along the paths, that in certain lives there are mountains to which we may never return. That in lives like his and mine, you cannot go back to the mountain that is in the center of all the rest, and at the beginning of your own story. And that wandering around the eight mountains is all that remains for those who, like us, on the first and highest, have lost a friend”

“I couldn't quite remember why I had moved away from the mountain, or what else I had loved when I no longer loved her, but it seemed to me, as I climbed it every morning in solitude, I was slowly making peace.”

“I didn't know whether to trust him because in the meantime I had changed.”

“I had learned from my father, long after I had stopped following him on the trails, that in some lives there are mountains to which it is not possible to return. That in lives like mine and his you can't go back to the mountain that is at the center of all the others, and at the beginning of your story. And that all that remains is to wander around the eight mountains for those who, like us, have lost a friend on the first and highest.”

“I was learning what happens to someone who leaves: that others continue to live without him.”

“If the point at which you immerse yourself in the river is the present, I thought, then the past is the water that has flowed past you, that which has gone downstream and where there is nothing left for you; whereas the future is the water that comes down from above, bringing dangers and surprises. The past is in the valley, the future is in the mountains.”

“If the point where you immerse yourself in a river is the present, I thought, then the past is the water that has washed past you, that continues downstream, where there is nothing left for you, while the future is the water that comes from above and that brings dangers and surprises. The past is downhill, the future uphill.”

“Look at that creek, do you see it? she said. Let's pretend that water is the time that flows. If here where we are is the present, which side do you think the future is on?”