Giovanni Verga

“ The poor "Candela di Sego" went and hid from sight, as if it behoved him to be ashamed, and Peppa was led off, handcuffed by soldiers, as if she also were a thief, she who had as much gold as Santa Margherita! Her poor mother was obliged to sell all the white linen stored in her trunk, and the gold earrings and the rings for the ten fingers, so as to pay the lawyers who defended her daughter and bring the girl home again,—poor, ill, in shame, ugly as Gramigna, and with Gramigna's child in her arms. ”

“ It will not have preserved in its living form any stamp of the mind in which it originated, any shade of the eye that beheld it, any trace of the lips that murmured the first words thereof as the creative fiat; it will exist by its own reason, by the mere fact that it is as it should be and must be, palpitating with life and as immutable as a statue of bronze, the author of which has had the divine courage of eclipsing himself and disappearing in his immortal work. ”

“ Then the prefect summoned all those gentlemen of the district—carabineers and companies of armed men and told them two words of the kind that makes men prick up their ears. The next day an earthquake in every nook and corner:—patrols, squadrons, scouts for every ditch and behind every wall; they hunted him by day, by night, on foot, on horse back, by telegraph, as if he had been a wild beast! Gramigna eluded them every time, and replied with shots if they came too close on his track. ”

“ I have a firm belief that the harmony of its forms will be so absolute, the sincerity of its reality so evident, its method and justification so deeply rooted, that the artist's hand will remain absolutely invisible. ”

“ We replace the artistic method to which we owe so many glorious masterpieces by a different method, more painstaking and more recondite; we willingly sacrifice the effect of the catastrophe, of the psychological result as it was seen through an almost divine intuition by the great artists of the past, and employ instead a logical development, inexorably necessary, less unexpected, less dramatic, but not less fatalistic; we are more modest, if not more humble ”

“ The carabineers' horses returned dead-tired; the soldiers threw themselves down in utter weariness on the ground when they got back to the stables; the patrols slept wherever chance offered; Gramigna alone was never tired, never slept, kept always on the wing, climbed down precipices, slipped through the harvest-fields, crept on all fours among the prickly pear-trees, [2] made his way out of danger like a wolf by means of the hidden channels of the torrents. ”

“ I have a firm belief that the triumph of the Novel, the completest and most human of all the works of art, will increase until the affinity and cohesion of all its parts will be so perfect, that the process of its creation will remain a mystery like the development of human passions ”

“ Supposing such perfection in the study of the passions should be ever attained that it would be useless to go further in the study of the interior man, will the science of the human heart, the fruit of the new art, so far and so universally develop all the resources of the imagination that in the future the only romances written will be "Various Facts?" ”

“ Then Peppa made the sign of the cross before the old mother's pillow, and made her escape out of the window.
Gramigna was in the prickly pear-trees of Palagonia, and they were not able to find him in that stronghold of rabbits. He was ragged and covered with blood, pale after two days of fasting; burning with fever, and he had his carbine levelled. When he saw her coming, resolute, among the prickly pear bushes, in the dim light of the gloaming, he hesitated a moment whether to shoot or not:—
"What do you want?" he demanded. "What are you coming here for?" ”

“ Then the romance will seem to portray a real event, and the work of art will apparently have come about by itself, spontaneously springing into being and maturing like a natural fact, without any point of contact with its author. ”

“ How did you do it?"
"The soldiers were on the other side, and there was a thick bush on this."
"But they put a bullet through your skin. There's blood on your dress."
"Yes."
"Where were you hit?"
"In the shoulder."
"That's nothing. You can walk."
So he allowed her to stay with him. She followed him, all in rags, shoeless, suffering from the fever caused by the wound, and yet she went foraging to procure for him a jug of water or a piece of bread, and if she came back with empty hands, escaping through the gunshots, her lover, devoured by hunger and thirst, would beat her. ”

“ The simple truth of human life will always make us thoughtful; will always have the effectiveness of reality, of genuine tears, of the fevers and sensations that have inflicted the flesh. The mysterious processes whereby conflicting passions mingle, develop and mature, will long constitute the chief fascination in the study of that psychological phenomenon called the plot of a story, and which modern analysis tries to follow with scientific care, through the hidden paths of oftentimes apparently contradictory complications. ”

“ On holidays, when she saw them with their plumes and their glittering epaulettes, stiff and erect in their gala uniforms, she devoured them with her eyes, and she was always at the barracks cleaning the big rooms and polishing the boots, so that they called her "The Carabineers' dish-cloth." ”