The truth is that he wanted to draw a little comfort from gazing at the stars. There were still one or two up there, at the zenith. As always, seeing them revived him; they were distant, they were omnipotent, and at the same time they were docile to his calculations; just the contrary to human beings, always too near, so weary and yet so quarrelsome.

The thought occurred to Don Fabrizio that it was ignorance of this supreme consolation that made the young feel sorrows much more sharply than the old; the latter are nearer the safety exit.

Nothing could be decently hated except eternity.

Don Fabrizio felt his heart thaw; his disgust gave way to compassion for all these ephemeral beings out to enjoy the tiny ray of light granted them between two shades, before the cradle, after the last spasms. How could one inveigh against those sure to die?

They are just different; perhaps they appear so strange to us because they have reached a stage toward which all those who are not saints are moving, that of indifference to earthly goods through surfeit.

When they were old and uselessly wise. . .

The animal had died tortured by anxious hopes of salvation, imagining it could still escape when it was already caught, just like so many human beings.

The term “countryside” implies soil transformed by labor; but the scrub clinging to the slopes was still in the very same state of scented tangle in which it had been found by Phoenicians, Dorians, and Ionians when they disembarked in Sicily, that America of antiquity. Don Fabrizio and Tumeo climbed up and down, slipped and were scratched by thorns, just as any Archidamus or Philostratus must have been tired and scratched twenty-five centuries before. They saw the same objects, their clothes were soaked with just as sticky a sweat, the same indifferent breeze blew steadily from the sea, moving myrtles and broom, spreading a smell of thyme. The dogs’ sudden pauses for though, their tension waiting for prey, was the very same as when Artemis was invoked for the chase. Reduced to these basic elements, its face washed clear of worries, life took on a tolerable aspect.