Alexander Stille > Quotes

“The protagonist of Pleasure, Andrea Sperelli, is an alter ego of the young D’Annunzio: a poet and refined aesthete, a dandy, a seducer, a slave to beauty and pleasure, utterly immoral and yet curiously appealing.”
― Alexander Stille, Il piacere

“I realize that I am expressing a concept that is hard for anyone who is not Sicilian or a mafioso to grasp...A man of honor...must always tell the truth.”
― Alexander Stille, Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic

“People in Sicily were unsure which possible scenario was worse: that a judge entrusted with the most delicate mafia cases had sold himself to the enemy of that an honest man had been destroyed by an occult hand. Some suggested a third possibly, that Signorino was not guilty of outright collusion but that he had committed some impropriety, accepted some favor, met or knew certain people of dubious reputation, which would invariant create an appearance of guilt with which he could not live.”
― Alexander Stille, Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic

“This group was composed almost entirely of high-performing urban professionals—doctors, lawyers, computer programmers, successful artists and writers, professors—who went to normal jobs by day but returned in the evening to a very different and highly secretive world built around fellowship, polygamous sex, radical politics, and political theater.”
― Alexander Stille, The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune

“The adjectives Pearce and Newton chose to describe the everyday life of mother and child are “phobic,” “psychotic,” and “miserable”; common nouns in the text are “anger,” “jealousy,” and “blackmail”; their favorite verbs are “handicap,” “paralyze,” “destroy,” and “atrophy.”
― Alexander Stille, The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune

“Along with believing that traditional families were bad for children, they also believed that a child’s biological inheritance was unimportant and that environment was everything.”
― Alexander Stille, The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune