Quotations about Venice
- "STREETS FULL OF WATER PLEASE ADVISE." With his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, the American humorist and writer, Robert Benchley (1889-1945), on arriving in Venice for the first time, sent this telegram to his editor at The New Yorker.
- "When I went to Venice I found that my dream had become-incredibly, but quite simply-my address." (Marcel Proust)
- "Thank God I am here. It is the paradise of cities." (John Ruskin)
- "Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go." (Truman Capote)
- "Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice, there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors." (Henry James)
- "If every museum in the New World were emptied, if every famous building in the Old World were destroyed and only Venice saved, there would be enough there to fill a full lifetime with delight. Venice, with all its complexity and variety, is in itself the greatest surviving work of art in the world." (Evelyn Waugh)
- "Abhorrent, green, slippery city." (D. H. Lawrence)
- Venice is "the repository of consolations." (Henry James)
- Venice is "the greatest masterpiece our species has produced." (Joseph Brodsky)
- "Yes, this was Venice, this was the fair frailty that fawned and that betrayed, half fairy-tale, half snare; the city in whose stagnating air the art of painting once put forth so lusty a growth, and where musicians were moved to accords so weirdly lulling and lascivious." (Thomas Mann)
- "It is a thing you would shed tears to see. I never saw the thing before that I should be afraid to describe...it is past all writing of or speaking of-almost past thinking of." (Charles Dickens)
- "In Venice, more than anywhere else, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts." (John Julius Norwich)
- "...the tourist Venice is Venice." (Mary McCarthy)
- "Once She did hold the gorgeous east in fee; And was the safeguard of the west..." (William Wordsworth)
- "My beautiful, my own, My only Venice..." (Lord Byron)
