Female guide: "The leper's room. D'Annunzio often retreated to this room to meditate. The bed in the centre has a hybrid shape between a cradle and a coffin. It symbolizes birth and death. This is also were his body was laid out, according to exact instructions , in the night of March first, 1938. The room, rich in esoteric significance, actually reminds one of a dying room."

Joseph Conrad: "Only the young have such moments. I don't mean the very young. No. The very young have, properly speaking, no moments. As I was going out of the chart-room he added suddenly, in a peculiar, wistful tone, that he hoped I would find what I was so anxious to go and look for. But his naive reasoning forgot to take into account the telegraph cable reposing on the bottom of the very Gulf up which he had turned that ship which he imagined himself to have saved from destruction.
People have a great opinion of the advantages of experience. But in that connection experience means always something disagreeable as opposed to the charm and innocence of illusions.
I must say I was losing mine rapidly. But on these instructive complications I must not enlarge more than to say that they could all be résuméd in the one word: Delay.
He would come on deck at night sometimes, take some sail off the ship, God only knows why or wherefore, then go below, shut himself up in his cabin, and play on the violin for hours - till daybreak perhaps.
Perhaps everything naturally was too much trouble for him. His hold on life was as slender as his hold on sanity.
I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvellous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural, which is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity.
I imagine the dead feel no animosity against the living. They care nothing for them. One knows well enough that all mankind had streamed that way.
It never occurred to me then that I didn't know in what soundness of mind exactly consisted and what a delicate and, upon the whole, unimportant matter it was.
I found to my surprise that I could eat quite a lot. This lapse from good taste happened before I was aware that I was capable of it."