Everything I Need to Know, I Learned from "Under the Tuscan Sun"

I recently saw "Under the Tuscan Sun" on cable. It had been several years since I watched the movie (released in 2003) and even longer since I had read the book. For most people, it is a movie about a woman moving to Italy, and experiencing Italian culture. I've never been to Italy, (although I'd love to go someday). But more importantly, to me, the story represents a woman taking some risks and following her dreams. This most recent viewing of it really struck home for me on so many levels...from "surviving" divorce, to following my dream of adoption from China...so many of the lines in the movie spoke to my heart this time around. I found myself with tears streaming down my face as the closing credits rolled.

I recently attended an online spirituality seminar. The teacher used the analogy of our spirits being like a lantern within in us. As things happen to us in life, there are times where the lantern gets shaded with soot and our light dims. Then we will learn something, or hear, or see something that cleans that soot away bit by bit...until our inner light is shining brightly again.

Watching this movie had that effect on me this time around so I wanted to share some of my favorite quotes from the movie - here we go:

Frances: Ladybugs, Katherine. Lots and lots of ladybugs...

German Woman: You greedy Americans. You think you're so entitled. You ruin everything. Frances: A lot of us feel really badly about that.

Frances: Do you know the most surprising thing about divorce? It doesn't actually kill you. Like a bullet to the heart or a head-on car wreck. It should. When someone you've promised to cherish till death do you part says "I never loved you," it should kill you instantly. You shouldn't have to wake up day after day after that, trying to understand how in the world you didn't know. The light just never went on, you know. I must have known, of course, but I was too scared to see the truth. Then fear just makes you so stupid.
Martini: No, it's not stupid, Signora Mayes. L'amore e cieco.
Frances: Oh, “love is blind”. Yeah, we have that saying too.
Martini: Everybody has that saying - because it's true everywhere.

Frances: What are four walls, anyway? They are what they contain. The house protects the dreamer.

Frances: I'd like to make an offer on the house. This is what I can pay, minus the work on the place, and a rental car to drive off a cliff when this all turns out to have been a terrible mistake.

Katherine: Regrets are a waste of time. They're the past crippling you in the present.

Katherine: Never lose your childish innocence. It's the most important thing.

Martini: Signora, between Austria and Italy, there is a section of the Alps called the Semmering. It is an impossibly steep, very high part of the mountains. They built a train track over these Alps to connect Vienna and Venice. They built these tracks even before there was a train in existence that could make the trip. They built it because they knew some day, the train would come.

Frances: Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere, I would be different. Unthinkably good things can happen even late in the game… It's such a surprise!