Gauntlets are the stuff of every life, but when you learn young how to pick them up, how to work them against the demons, and finally how to outlast …

- Marlena De Blasi

There isn't an agony in the world more powerful than tenderness

- Marlena De Blasi

Some people are born empty. All manner of good deeds and patience and loving kindness can't even begin to fill them up.

- Marlena De Blasi

We accumulate pain, collect it. ... We display it, stack it up into a pile, then we stack it up into a mountain, so we can climb up onto it, waiting …

- Marlena De Blasi

Living as a couple never means that each gets half. You must take turns at giving more than getting. It’s not the same as a bow to the other whether …

- Marlena De Blasi

I run down to meet Floriana who is breathless from her hike. She stops in the road, the last light at her back. Prickles of rain cling to her unkerch…

- Marlena De Blasi

Much of my crying is for joy and wonder rather than for pain. A trumpet's wailing, a wind's warm breath, the chink of a bell on an errant lamb, the s…

- Marlena De Blasi

most crimes are connected to hunger. One hunger or another.

- Marlena De Blasi

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…

- Marlena De Blasi