Pelagia Iannis Quotes

“Don’t have any silly ideas about soldiers. Soldiers have mothers, you know, and most of us end up as farmers and fishermen like everyone else.”

“You must allow Pelagia to become a doctor. She is not only my daughter. She is, since I have no son, the nearest to a son that I have fathered.”

“I just don’t understand why an artist like you would descend to being a soldier.”

“I wish that you will have children together, and I wish that once or twice you will tell them about their Uncle Carlo that they never saw.”

“She must have a son’s prerogatives, because she will continue my life when I am gone. I have not brought her up to be a domestic slave, for the simple reason that such company would have been tedious in the absence of a son.”

“As she reached for it she realized for the first time, and with a small shock, that she had learned enough from her father over the years to become a doctor herself.”

“If there was such a thing as a doctor who was also a woman. She toyed with the idea, and then went to look for a paintbrush, as though this action could cancel the uncomfortable sensation of having been born into the wrong world.”

“For Lemoni there would be no freedom until widowhood, which was precisely the time when the community would turn against her, as though she had no right to outlive a husband, as though he had died only because of his wife’s negligence.”

“I know that she will never tell me that she is waiting for a new world where a Greek may love an Italian and think nothing of it.”