The Godfather
by Mario Puzo
Quotes
BOOK I
“Friendship is everything. Friendship is more than talent. It is more than government. It is almost the equal of a family. Never forget that. If you had built up a wall of friendships you wouldn’t have to ask me for help.” – Don Vito Corleone
“Don Corleone dismissed this emotional nonsense with a wave of his hand. Among reasonable men problems of business could always be solved.”
“Ah, men understand friendship more than we women.”
“Never get angry,” the Don had instructed. “Never make a threat. Reason with people.” The word “reason” sounded so much better in Italian, ragione, to rejoin. The art of this was to ignore all insults, all threats; to turn the other cheek.
“Italians have a little joke, that the world is so hard a man must have two fathers to look after him, and that’s why they have godfathers.” – Tom Hagen
“He found it inconceivable that a grown man of substance would let such trivialities affect his judgment in an affair business, and one of such importance. In Hagen’s world, in the Corleones’ world, the physical beauty, the sexual power of women, carried not the slightest weight in worldly matters. It was a private affair, except, of course, in matters of marriage and family disgrace.”
“Santino, never let anyone outside the Family know what you are thinking. Never let them know what you have under your fingernails. I think your brain is going soft from all that comedy you play with that young girl. Stop it and pay attention to details. Now get out of my sight.” – Don Vito Corleone
“Why should I be afraid now? Strange people have come to kill me ever since I was twelve years old.” – Don Vito Corleone
Michael stood up. “You’d better stop laughing,” he said. The change in him was so extraordinary that the smiles vanished from the faces of Clemenza and Tessio. Michael was not tall or heavily built but his presence seemed to radiate danger. In that moment he was a reincarnation of Don Corleone himself. His eyes had gone a pale tan and his face was bleached of color. He seemed at any moment about to fling himself on his older and stronger brother. There was no doubt that if he had had a weapon in his hands Sonny would have been in danger. Sonny stopped laughing, and Michael said to him in a cold deadly voice, “Don’t you think I can do it, you son of a bitch?”
Sonny got over his laughing fit. “I know you can do it,” he said. “I wasn’t laughing at what you said. I was laughing at how funny things turn out. I always said you were the toughest one in the Family, tougher than the Don himself. You were the only one who could stand off the old man. I remember you when you were a kid. What a temper you had then. Hell, you even used to fight me and I was a lot older than you. And Freddie had to beat the shit out of you at least once a week. And now Sollozzo has you figured for the soft touch in the Family because you let McCluskey hit you without fighting back and you wouldn’t get mixed up in the Family fights. He figures he got nothing to worry about if he meets you head to head. And McCluskey too, he’s got you figured for a yellow guinea.” Sonny paused and then said softly, But you’re a Corleone after all, you son of a bitch. And I was the only one who knew it. I’ve been sitting here waiting for the last three days, ever since the old man got shot, waiting for you to crack out of that Ivy League, war hero bullshit character you’ve been wearing. I’ve been waiting for you to become my right arm so we can kill those fucks that are trying to destroy our father and our Family. And all it took was a sock on the jaw. How do you like that?” – Santino Corleone
“What the hell do you mean, a rookie? I listened to the old man just as hard as you did. How do you think I got smart?” – Michael Corleone
“He [Mark McCluskey] never took his son around to the storekeepers to collect his money presents for ignoring garbage violations and parking violations; he took money directly into his own hand, direct because he felt he earned it.”
“But he wasn’t indignant about his low pay, he understood that everybody had to take care of themselves.”
“Oh, Christ, Sonny, stop playing the big brother. I’ve been in combat against tougher guys than Sollozzo and under worse conditions. Where the hell are his mortars? Has he got air cover? Heavy artillery? Land mines? He’s just a wise son of a bitch with a big-wheel cop sidekick. Once anybody makes up their mind to kill them there’s no other problem. That’s the hard part, making up your mind. They’ll never know what hit them.” – Michael Corleone
“Tom, don’t let anybody kid you. It’s all personal, every bit of business. Every piece of shit every man has to eat every day of his life is personal. They call it business. OK. But it’s personal as hell. You know where I learned that from? The Don. My old man. The Godfather. If a bolt of lightning hit a friend of his the old man would take it personal. He took my going to the Marines personal. That’s what makes him great. The Great Don. He takes everything personal. Like God. He knows every feather that falls from the tail of a sparrow or however the hell it goes. Right? And you know something? Accidents don’t happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult.” – Michael Corleone
“I’ll tell you one thing you didn’t learn from him: talking the way you’re talking now. There are things that have to be done and you do them and you never talk about them. You don’t try to justify them. They can’t be justified. You just do them. Then you forget it.” – Tom Hagen
BOOK II
“Her returning kiss was warm but not passionate and he preferred it that way right now. He hated girls who turned on all of a sudden as if their bodies were motors galvanized into erotic pumpings by the touching of a hairy switch.”
“She understood his hunger for beauty, his irresistible impulse toward young women far more beautiful than she. It was known that he always slept with his movie co-stars at least once. His boyish charm was irresistible to them, as their beauty was to him.”
“You could tell a girl who really liked to fuck and they were always the best. Especially the ones who hadn’t been at it too long. What he really hated were the ones who had started screwing at twelve and were all fucked out by the time they were twenty and just going through the motions and some of them were the prettiest of all and could fake you out.”
“The patio lighting was artfully arranged to flatter feminine faces and skin. These were women Nino had seen on the darkened movie screens when he had been a teenager. They had played their part in his erotic dreams of adolescence. But seeing them now in the flesh was like seeing them in some horrible makeup. Nothing could hide the tiredness of their spirit and their flesh; time had eroded their godhead. They posed and moved as charmingly as he remembered but they were like wax fruit, they could not lubricate his glands.”
“In that moment he understood Nino, why his boyhood singing partner had never become successful, why he was trying to destroy any chance of success now. That Nino was reacting away from all the prices of success, that in some way he felt insulted by everything that was being done for him.”
“Finally somebody had a great idea. The public mating of the two winners, everybody else at the party to be spectators in the stands. The actress was stripped down and the other women started to undress Johnny Fontane. It was then that Nino, the only sober person there, grabbed the half-clothed Johnny and slung him over his shoulder and fought his way out of the house and to their car. As he drove Johnny home, Nino thought that if that was success, he didn’t want it.”
BOOK III
“He never showed anger in any way but bided his time.”
“They found each other congenial. Clemenza was a storyteller; Vito Corleone was a listener to storytellers. They became casual friends.”
Even as a young man, Vito Corleone became known as a “man of reasonableness.” He never uttered a threat. He always used logic that proved to be irresistible.
“But great men are not born great, they grow great, as so it was with Vito Corleone.”
“But even then Vito Corleone was so mature a man that he did not take insult at a threat or become angry and refuse a profitable offer because of it. He evaluated the threat, found it lacking in conviction, and lowered his opinion of his new partners because they had been so stupid to use threats were none were needed. This was useful information to be pondered at its proper time.”
“This of course was not pure Christian charity. Not his best friends would have called Don Corleone a saint of heaven. There was some self-interest in this generosity.”
“Well then I can’t talk to you about how you should behave. Don’t you want to finish school, don’t you want to be a lawyer? Lawyers can steal more money with a briefcase then a thousand men with guns and masks.” – Don Vito Corleone
“Every man has one destiny.” – Don Vito Corleone
“The Don considered the use of threats the most foolish kind of exposure; the unleashing of anger without forethought as the most dangerous indulgence. No one had ever heard the Don utter a naked threat, no one had ever seen him in an uncontrollable rage. It was unthinkable. And so he tried to teach Sonny his own disciplines. He claimed that there was no greater natural advantage in life than having an enemy overestimate your faults, unless it was to have a friend overestimate your virtues.”
BOOK IV
“It pleased him to see the hurt look on her face, the tears springing into her eyes. She might be a daughter of the Great Don but she was his wife, she was his property now and he could treat her as he pleased. It made him feel powerful that one of the Corleones was his doormat.”
“She is my daughter,” he had said, “but now she belongs to her husband. He knows his duties. Even the King of Italy didn’t dare to meddle with the relationship of husband and wife. Go home and learn how to behave so that he will not beat you.” – Don Vito Corleone
“He never used elevators. They were death traps.”
“I had to bat my wife around today, teach her who’s the boss.” – Carlo Rizzi
“…if Sonny intended to kill the man he would never have uttered the threat. He uttered it in frustration because he could not carry it out.”
“Any profession was worthy of respect to men who for centuries earned bread by the sweat of their brows.”
“As a boy, he had been truly tenderhearted. That he had become a murderer as a man was simply his destiny.”
BOOK V
“Their lives and their fortunes depended upon their doing each other services, the denial of a favor asked by a friend was an act of aggression. Favors were not asked lightly and so could not be lightly refused.”
“They are clever enough to make a good living. Why is it so necessary to be more clever than that?” – Don Vito Corleone
“Women and children can afford to be careless, men cannot.” – Don Vito Corleone
“The clan did not ask help from any of the Families or Don Corleone because Felix had refused to ask their help and had to be taught a lesson: that mercy comes only from the Family, that the Family is more loyal and more to be trusted than society.”
“Their passion for each other was of the most elementary kind, undiluted by poetry or any form of intellectualism. It was love of the coarsest nature, a fleshy love, a love of tissue for opposing tissue.”
“Truth telling and medicine just didn’t go together except in dire emergencies, if then.”
BOOK VI
“But something told him this was one of those wild strokes of good fortune that Sicilians always believed in, something told him that his daughter’s beauty would make her fortune and her family secure.”
BOOK VII
“Mothers are like cops. They always believe the worst.” – Michael Corleone
“He understood women and he understood now that Virginia was down because she thought he was having everything his own way. Women really hated seeing their men doing too well. It irritated them. It made them less sure of the hold they exerted over them through affection, sexual custom or marriage ties.”
“Tell him I’m dying. Tell him show business is more dangerous than the olive oil business.” – Nino Valenti
“He sensed something else in the young man: a force cleverly kept hidden, a man jealously guarding his true strength from public gaze, following the Don’s precept that a friend should always underestimate your virtues and an enemy overestimate your faults.”
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