Don Corleone had promised his godson he would get the part and Don Corleone had never, to Hagen’s knowledge, broken his word in such matters.
His appearance was intimidating not from any single feature but from a lifelong habit of presenting a formidable front to the outside world.
But his Godfather had never said such and such a thing could be done without having it done.
Let me go further. If my son is struck by a bolt of lightning I will blame some of the people here.
Nothing was going to stop him from owning this girl, possessing her, locking her in a house and keeping her prisoner only for himself.
Don Tommasino also controlled the water rights in the area and vetoed the local building of any new dams by the Roman government. Such dams would ruin the lucrative business of selling water from the artesian wells he controlled, make water too cheap, ruin the whole important water economy so laboriously built up over hundreds of years.
The victory of the Corleone Family was complete. During that same twenty-four-hour period Clemenza and Lampone turned loose their regimes and punished the infiltrators of the Corleone domains.
He felt that flush of antagonism a poor man feels for a rich woman who is in some way asserting her superiority to him because of a wealth and social position.
I cannot wait an eternity for happiness.
A life without flowers is no life at all, for beauty is more necessary than we can imagine.
With children he was playful in that particularly spiteful Sicilian style which is one of the less pleasant sides of the island character; he would nip their ears with his scissors and sometimes cut their hair so short that their heads looked like billiard balls.
Drop the gun, pick up the cannoli.
Thank God you’re poor, Mom.
But great men are not born great, they grow great, and so it was with Vito Corleone.
Why couldn’t he get a straight answer from any of them? Because this was Sicily, he thought. Sicilians had a horror of truth.
The fabulous land where there was justice for the poor, where the government was not the lackey of the rich, where the penniless Sicilians rose to riches simply by good honest labor.
And so on that bright morning, the smoky Sicilian sun making them sweat, the six Mafia chiefs rode their horses up and down along the wall surrounding Prince Ollorto’s estate. The assembled peasants, under olive trees older than Christ, watched these six men, famous all over Sicily for their ferocity. They waited as if hoping for some miracle, too fearful to move forward.
Sometimes I’d see a movie in a private screening room. No fun. People took phone calls and messages while watching. Made jokes, talked. When I go to a movie I’m a true believer. Or I just walk out.
He was not a bad man, he was a good husband and father, but constant worry about his investments, about the money he earned, about the inevitable expenses that came with being a man of property had worn his nerves to a frazzle so that he was in a constant state of irritation.
Don’t ever take sides with anyone against the Family again.