“We should care for each other more than we care for ideas, or else we will end up killing each other.”
Dr. Iannis is a wise old man. At the beginning of the novel he's a pacifist, preferring forgiveness and open-mindedness to violence. This is how he raises Pelagia to think as well. But after years in a German prison camp, he takes a more cynical outlook on life.
“That is morality; I make myself imagine that it is personal.”
Corelli is impressive to Pelagia because of his moral virtues. He truly is a good man. When asked how he makes his decisions especially during a war of such brutality as this one, he explains that he treats people like people. Everyone is a friend or family member to him.
“Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away.”
Pelagia arrives at this conclusion only after experiencing both love and infatuation. With Mandras she was young and impetuous, carried away with the image of him she had formed in her mind, but when Corelli came along she had already decided not to like him. She learned to love him and discovered a truly beautiful love as a result.
“Fascism is fundamentally and at bottom an aesthetic conception, and . . . it is your function as creators of beautiful things to portray with the greatest efficacy the sublime beauty and inevitable reality of the Fascist ideal.”
As an Italian, Corelli has been raised with Fascist ideals. He does not possess Pelagia and her father's naivete because he's had to analyze himself for so long to make sense of things he was taught but couldn't adopt. He does find a way to create beauty for other people to enjoy, but he does so freely through his music. He's not propagating some political ideal in order to persuade people to join a cause; he's telling them to listen and enjoy and to recognize that they too are beautiful.
