Top 35 Natalia Ginzburg Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “But that was the best time of my life, and only now that it has gone from me forever – only now do I realize it.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

2. “Ma non si amano soltanto le memorie felici. A un certo punto della vita, ci si accorge che si amano le memorie.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

3. “As soon as we see our dreams betrayed we realize that the intensest joys of our life have nothing to do with reality, and we are consumed with regret for the time when they glowed within us. And in this succession of hopes and regrets our life slips by.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

4. “What we must remember above all in the education of our children is that their love of life should never weaken.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

5. “But he said that all men made you sorry for them if you looked at them closely, and that in fact one ought to guard against that excess of compassion which arose suddenly, from looking closely at people.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

6. “Today, as never before, the fates of men are so intimately linked to one another that a disaster for one is a disaster for everybody.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

7. “No adultery is bloodless.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

8. “England is a country where people stay exactly as they are. The soul does not receive the slightest jolt.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

9. “Someone who has seen a house collapse knows only too clearly what frail things little vases of flowers and pictures and white walls are. He knows only too well what a house is made of.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

10. “My tidiness, and my untidiness, are full of regret and remorse and complex feelings.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

11. “Being moderate with oneself and generous with others; this is what is meant by having a just relationship with money, by being free as far as money is concerned.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

12. “It seemed to us that his sadness was that of a boy, the voluptuous heedless melancholy of a boy who has still not come down to earth, and moves in the arid, solitary world of dreams.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

13. “Italy is a country which is willing to submit itself to the worst governments. It is, as we know, a country ruled by disorder, cynicism, incompetence and confusion. Nevertheless we are aware of intelligence circulating in the streets like a vivid bloodstream.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

14. “Human relationships have to be rediscovered every day. We have to remember constantly that every kind of meeting with our neighbor is a human action and so it is always evil or good, true or deceitful, a kindness or a sin.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

15. “And we are a people without tears. The things that moved our parents do not move us at all.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

16. “Every day silence harvests its victims. Silence is a mortal illness.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

17. “At times he was very unhappy, but for a long time we thought that he would be cured of this unhappiness when he decided to become an adult; his unhappiness seemed like that of a boy – the absent-minded, voluptuous melancholy of a boy who has not yet got his feet on the ground and who lives in the sterile, solitary world of his dreams.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

18. “The true defense against wealth is not a fear of wealth – of its fragility and of the vicious consequences that it can bring – the true defense against wealth is an indifference to money.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

19. “When I write stories I am like someone who is in her own country, walking along streets that she has known since she was a child, between walls and trees that are hers.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

20. “Two little provincial intellectuals, that was what they were, and that is the dreariest and oddest thing that can exist on earth.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

21. “I think of a writer as a river: you reflect what passes before you.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

22. “But after a certain point in life a person has to dunk her regrets in the morning coffee, just like biscuits.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

23. “We become adolescents when the words that adults exchange with one another become intelligible to us.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

24. “I begin to suspect that England is the most melancholy country in the world.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

25. “They weren’t happy memories because your father and I were never happy together. Even if we had been briefly and occasionally happy, everything got sullied, ripped up, and destroyed. But people don’t love each other only for happy memories. At a certain point in life, you realize that you just love the memories.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

26. “And they laughed a little and were very friendly together, the three of them, Anna, Emanuele and Giustino; and they were pleased to be together, the three of them, thinking of all those who were dead, and of the long war and the sorrow and noise and confusion, and of the long, difficult life which they saw in front of them now, full of all the things they did not know how to do.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

27. “Over my real sorrows I never weep.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

28. “He knew how to find time to study and to write, to earn his living and to wander idly through the streets he loved; whereas we, who staggered from laziness to frantic activity and back again, wasted our time trying to decide whether we were lazy or industrious.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

29. “But the English do not know what surprise is. No one ever turns his head to look at anyone else in the street.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

30. “You aren’t ill: it is just that you are made of second-rate materials.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

31. “Fanfares of trumpets usually announced only small, futile things, it was a way fate had of teasing people. You felt a great exaltation and heard a loud fanfare of trumpets in the sky. But the serious things of life, on the contrary, took you by surprise, they spurted up all of a sudden like water.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

32. “I think we will send you money periodically. Not that money will solve anything, since you’re alone, broke, unsettled, and unreliable. But we’re all unreliable and broken somewhere inside and sometimes it seems desperately attractive to be unrooted and breaking nothing but your own solitude. That’s how people find each other, and understand.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

33. “All these were things that at present seemed like a dream, because Fascism was in power and Fascism wanted people to let themselves crumble away.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

34. “This life now has nothing to equal to the places and moments we passed through to get here.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

35. “And no one knew what was in store for the dead, he said, perhaps nothing at all but perhaps, on the other hand, there was something, probably a great boredom, he said, a deathly boredom.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

36. “So I wasn’t there when he died, which I regret. But after a certain point in life a person has to dunk her regrets in the morning coffee, just like biscuits.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

37. “But it was incredible how fear and danger never produced ignoble words but always true ones, words that were torn from your very heart.”

— Natalia Ginzburg

38. “And Ippolito too, in his own way, had been a real person, even though he had come to that insect-like end.”

— Natalia Ginzburg