Veronica Franco

Do not ask of me what you cannot give yourself.

— My cage seems bigger than yours, but it's still a cage. If you want sympathy, you won't get it. I don't want your sympathy.
— Do you know what my daughter's nurse told her this morning? That in a girl's voice lies temptation. A known fact. Eloquence in a woman means promiscuity. Promiscuity of the mind leads to promiscuity of the body. She doesn't believe her yet, but she will. She'll grow up just like her mother. She'll marry, bear children and honor her family... spend her youth in needlepoint and rue the day she was born a girl. And when she dies... she'll wonder why she obeyed all the rules of God and country... because no biblical hell could ever be worse... than this state of perpetual inconsequence.

— Please trust me.
— I don't know how...

— And where might you be going?
— Nowhere.
— That nowhere has a nice tenor.

— Then for what did they pay you?
— For the dream of loce. As it cannot exist in this world that you've created. For the hope: there might xist on earth some corner of this paradise...

— You're yoo young to accept what I would truly give you.
— Well, I am not so young as you are vain.

— You yearn for my tears?
— I don't think so. Then what do I yearn for?
— Why don't we find out?

— Must be interesting, being in a room full of men, most of whom you've seen with their pants down.
— Puts it all in some kind of perspective.

— You know her husband well.
— Not at all well, but his reputation precedes him.

I wish it were not a sin to have liked it so. God made sin: that we might know his mercy.

— Your parents, marry your sister off to that piece of decaying flesh.
— That piece of decaying flesh is a cousin of the doge... confidant of the pope. The Roman court adores him.
— The Roman court doesn't have to sleep with him.

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