Pier Paolo Pasolini



-- He traveled. Although he was still almost a boy, in '61 he went to America; in '62, as we will see, he got to know all the Arab countries, and he went as far as Tanzania. Thus Italy early on appeared to him, almost naturally, as a very particular world, one of many parts of a whole and not among the most important. That it was the center of the world, the navel of the world, seemed to him at a very young age a fable, although he had felt it deeply in childhood. But here, too, a contradiction must be noted. At the same moment that Carlo was detaching himself from Italy, recognizing its ancient and poetic characteristics, he was specializing in that peculiarly Italian science which is sharing in power. He was perfectly free to desire power -- power not mentioned, not named, defined only empirically -- even if he was without vanity and almost, I feel the urge to say, ascetic and without ambition. Certainly there was a marvelous freedom, which sterilized guilt, made evil unproductive: a freedom as if born of itself and endowed with such real force that a whole part of the historical universe could be rendered immune from the curiosity of conscience.

-- (however beautiful relations with the cosmos are, they are of brief duration: they are of little use and cause one to lose other things -- time, sleep, etc. -- that are reasonably necessary. The sincerity of relations with the cosmos is soon exhausted: they tend to be transformed immediately into an act of homage, into a dutiful concentration, from which man seeks to free himself, hypocritically repressing his impatience, like a child in religion class)....

-- Whether their faces were marked by folds of fat or were unhappily thin and drawn, they all believed. They believed as the dead believe. There, in the eternity of an evening reception in midsummer, with lights blazing in the coolness of the evening on the stunted grass of a little garden stuck in among luxurious apartment houses, where from time to time a breeze agitated the shiny leaves of the lemon trees, those people remained as if untouched, with smiles glued to their lips, glasses or pastries in hand; and with, above all, that faith, that hope, that carefree lack of charity. The problems were the problems of the moment, the truth was the truth of that moment (and every person there evidently numbered himself, without the slightest doubt, among the privileged repositories of that truth; there was not a gesture, a smile, a wink that did not allude to this.)

-- The absence of women meant an absence of nuances.

-- "I have erected this statue in order to laugh." -...it's well known that one function of the 'laugh' is to resolve cosmic crises, if it's caused by the display of the 'member' or the 'vulva.' {Lingam & yoni}

-- There are people who have believed in nothing since their birth. That does not remove the fact that those people act, make something of their life, are busy with something, produce something. Other people have, instead, the vice of believing: duties become concrete before their eyes as ideals to be realized.
    If, one fine day, they no longer believe -- or perhaps gradually, because of a logical, or even illogical, series of disappointments -- you see how they rediscover that 'nothingness' which for others has always been so natural.
    For them, however the discovery of 'nothingness' is a novelty that involves other things; it involves, that is, not only the continuation of action, of intervention, of industriousness (understood no longer as Duties but as gratuitous acts) but also the exhilarating sensation that all this is only a game.*
    *"O, Menippus, Diogenes exhorts you, if you've laughed enough at the things of the earth, come here, where you will laugh even more. Where you are, laughter always had a certain doubtfulness, that doubt being: who really knows what's after life? but here you won't stop laughing with all your heart...." (Lucian, Dialogues of the Dead)

-- Every preconceived idea of the future succumbs to derision; in fact, if there is one thing that causes us to smile inside with greater pleasure, it is precisely the future. The idea of hope for the future becomes irresistibly comic. The resulting lucidity strips the world of fascination. But the return to it is a form of rebirth; the eye of irony sparkles as it looks at events, at men, at the old imbeciles in power, the young men who believe they are beginning heaven knows what.

-- "If the material is nothing, we are materialists."
    "What always speaks silently is the body."
    "[In Lifu's native tongue], the sexual organ is called one's word."
    "Don't be at home anywhere."
    "To teach is not to speak, it is to not speak of the obscure."
    "If the truth is not new, it does not exist."
    "Bring meaninglessness back to words."
    "Admit the void: accept the loss forever."