The Baron in the Trees Quotes

“I’ve already said we spent hours and hours in the trees, and not for utilitarian reasons, like many boys, who climb up just to look for fruit or birds’ nests, but for the pleasure of overcoming difficult protuberances and forks, and getting as high as possible, and finding beautiful places to stop and look at the world below, to make jokes and shout at those who passed under us.”

“For the rest of the day our mother withdrew into her rooms to make lace and embroidery and filet, because in truth the generalessa was able to attend only to this traditional women’s work, and only here could she vent her warrior passion.”

“I was just eight then, everything seemed to me a game, the battle of us children against the adults was the battle that all children fight. I didn’t understand that my brother’s determination concealed something deeper.”

″...and the time she cooked a whole porcupine, with all its spines, who knows why, surely just to shock us when she raised the cover of the dish...”

“Was it a bad thing or good? Who can say? Cosimo’s life was so far out of the ordinary, mine so orderly and modest, and yet our childhood was spent together, both of us indifferent to the adults’ obsessions, as we sought pathways different from those trodden by other people.”

“In many people the unrest of the age instills a need to become restless as well, but in the wrong direction, on the wrong track...”

“He looked at everything, and everything was as if nothing.”

“I, too, learned, because I followed him in everything, except that I, always more modest and prudent, jumped off halfway down the staircase, or slid down bit by bit, braking constantly.”