Andrea Camilleri famous quotes

Montalbano felt moved. This was real friendship, Sicilian friendship, the kind based on intuition, on what was left unsaid. With a true friend, one never needs to ask, because the other understands on his own accordingly.
-- Andrea Camilleri

#True Friend #Real #Intuition

Montalbano and Valente seemed not to have heard him, looking as if their minds were elsewhere. But in fact they were paying very close attention, like cats that, keeping their eyes closed as if asleep, are actually counting the stars.
-- Andrea Camilleri

#Stars #Cat #Eye

Nowadays, if a man living in a civilized country (ha!) hears cannon blasts in his sleep, he will, of course, mistake them for thunderclaps, gun salutes on the feast day of the local patron saint, or furniture being moved by the slime-buckets living upstairs, and go right on sleeping soundly. But the ringing of the telephone, the triumphal march of the cell phone, or the doorbell, no: Those are all sounds of summons in response to which the civilzed man (ha-ha!) has no choice but to surface from the depths of slumber and answer.
-- Andrea Camilleri

#Country #Mistake #Sleep

What do two women friends usually do when they see each other? We talked, we watched television, we listened to music Sometimes we did nothing at all. It was a pleasure just to know the other one was there.
-- Andrea Camilleri

#Two #Television #Sometimes

The memory of the aged becomes clearer and clearer with time. It has no pity.
-- Andrea Camilleri

#Memories #Pity

Wearing glasses for reading meant surrendering to old age without the least bit of a fight.
-- Andrea Camilleri

#Reading #Fighting #Glasses

But then why, when talking on the phone, did they quarrel, on average at least once every four sentences? Maybe, though the inspector, it was an effect of the distance between them becoming less and less tolerable with each passing day, since as we grow old - for every now and then one must, yes, look reality in the eye and call things by their proper names - we feel more keenly the need to have the person we love beside us.
-- Andrea Camilleri

#Love #Distance #Eye

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.
-- Andrea Camilleri

#Taken #Different #Culture

Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived...Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation... Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend. What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.

The best part about having true friends is that you can go months without seeing them and they'll still be there for you and act as if you'd never left!

I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me, but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.

Socrates famously said that the unconsidered life is not worth living. He meant that a life lived without forethought or principle is a life so vulnerable to chance, and so dependent on the choices and actions of others, that it is of little real value to the person living it. He further meant that a life well lived is one which has goals, and integrity, which is chosen and directed by the one who lives it, to the fullest extent possible to a human agent caught in the webs of society and history.

In ourselves we harbor the intuition of another evolution, of other possibilities of life.

Their every instinct - and I have to say this is without exception - is to iron out the bumps, and It's always the bumps that are the most interesting stuff.

No matter how much time you spend reading books or following your intuition, you're gonna screw it up. Fifty times. You can't do parenting right.

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity.

For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.

Someone responding to intuition, to chance and fortune, often can't explain himself well.