Judith Summers > Quotes

“When asked by an English poet who was at the table to read the ancient couplet Discite grammatici cur mascula nomina cunnus/ Et cur femineum mentula nomen habet -Teach us, grammarians, why vagina (cunnus) is a masculine noun/ And why penis (mentula) is feminine –Giacomo answered it with a witty pentameter of his own invention: Disce quod a domino nomina servus habet -It is because the slave always takes the name of his master.”
― Judith Summers, Casanova's Women: The Great Seducer and the Women He Loved

“Equally at ease in a palace, a merchant’s house or a brothel, and most at home between a woman’s legs, Casanova successfully straddled the worlds of the high life to which he aspired, and the low life into which he had been born.”
― Judith Summers, Casanova's Women: The Great Seducer and the Women He Loved

“Today is Casanova’s seventy-third birthday, and he is already suffering from the debilitating painful bladder disorder which will claim his life in two months’ time. Considering how many deceived husbands and women must have wanted to kill him during the course of his long life it is ironic that he is destined to die of a urinary infection in the safety of his own bed.”
― Judith Summers, Casanova's Women: The Great Seducer and the Women He Loved

“Story of My Life absorbs all of Casanova’s pent-up creativity from the day in 1789 he begins writing it as an act of desperation, ‘the only remedy to keep from going mad or dying with grief’. Unable to break out of his Bohemian prison in the same way he once famously broke out of Venice’s Leads, he escapes in the only way possible: by time-travelling through his past.”
― Judith Summers, Casanova's Women: The Great Seducer and the Women He Loved