Pier Paolo Pasolini Quotes

I, too, head for the Baths of Caracalla,
thinking - with my old, magnificent
privilege of thinking ...
(And let there still be a god in me that thinks,
lost, weak, and childish,
yet whose voice is so human
it is almost a song.) Oh, to leave
this prison of poverty!
To be free of the yearning
that makes these ancient nights so splendid!
He who knows yearning, and he who does not,
have something in common: man's desires are humble.

We survive, in the confusion
of a life reborn beyond reason.

Football is the last sacred ritual of our time.

When the soul hears no other calls than those of the sweet chaos of daily good and evil ...

Poor as the poor I cling,
like them, to humiliating hopes;
like them, each day I nearly kill myself
just to live.

The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn't lessen but augments this love of life.

I am black with love/ neither boy nor nightingale/ perfectly whole as a flower/ I desire without impulse

Behold those times re-created by
the brutal power of sunlit images,
the light of life's tragedy.
The walls of the trial, the field
of the firing squad; and the distant
ghost of Rome's suburbs in a ring,
gleaming white in naked light.
Gunshots: our death, our survival.

The power of consumer goods ... has been engendered by the so-called liberal and progressive demands of freedom, and, by appropriating them, has emptied them of their meaning, and changed their nature.

It's not Love. But what fault is it of mine
if my affections do not become
Love? Very much my fault, I would say,
when I can live from day to day
on mad purity, blind pity ...
Make a scandal of meekness.
But the violence of the senses and intellect
that has confounded me for years
was the only way.

Nothing remains but to hope the end will come to extinguish the unrelenting pain of waiting for it.

When I make a film I'm always in reality among the trees, and among the people like yourselves. There's no symbolic or conventional filter between me and reality as there is in literature. The cinema is an explosion of my love for reality.

If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.

And dead an epoch of our existence, which in a world destined to humiliate us was moral light and resistance.

An artist, if he's unselfish and passionate, is always a living protest. Just to open his mouth is to protest: against conformism, against what is official, public, or national, what everyone else feels comfortable with, so the moment he opens his mouth, an artist is engaged, because opening his mouth is always scandalous.

The sexual freedom of today for most people is really only a convention, an obligation, a social duty, a social anxiety, a necessary feature of the consumer's way of life.

The revolution is now just a sentiment.

The fury of confession, at first,
then the fury of clarity:
It was from you, Death, that such hypocritical
obscure feeling was born! And now
let them accuse me of every passion,
let them bad-mouth me, let them say I'm deformed,
impure, obsessed, a dilettante, a perjurer.
You isolate me, you give me the certainty of life,
I'm on the stake. I play the card of fire
and I win this little, immense goodness of mine.
I can do it, for I have suffered you too much!

I return to you as an émigré returns
to his own country and rediscovers it:
I made a fortune (in the intellect)
and I'm happy, as I once was,
destitute of any norm,
a black rage of poetry in my breast.
A crazy old-age youth.
Once your joy was confused with terror,
it's true, and now almost with other joy,
livid and arid, my passion deluded.
Now you really frighten me,
for you are truly close to me,
part of my angry state, of obscure hunger,
of the anxiety almost of a new being.

The birds sang in the dust
in an elaborate weave, ambiguous,
deafening, prey to existence
poor passions lost between the modest
summits of groves of mulberry and elder;
and I, like them, in secluded places
reserved for the lost and pure,
would wait for evening to fall,
for the silent smells of fire
and joyous misery to fill the air,
for the Angelus bell to toll, veiled
in the new peasant mystery
fulfilled in the ancient mystery.

It has been said that I have three heroes: Christ, Marx and Freud. This is reducing everything to formulae. In truth, my only hero is Reality. If I have chosen to be a filmmaker as well as a writer it is because, rather than expressing reality through those symbols that are words, I have preferred the cinema as a means of expression - to express reality through reality ...

If I then discovered a cancer in myself and died, I'd consider it a victory of that reality of things.

For to a boy it can seem
that he shall never have what he alone
has never had.

But their discovery of the void brings with it new implications: not only that they must continue on in their actions and diligence, no longer considered as duties but as gratuitous, senseless routines, but also the exhilarating realization that all is nothing but a game.

In the end, oh I know,
never, in my haggard passion,
have I ever been such a cadaver as now
as I take again in hand my tables of the present
if reality's real, but after it's been
destroyed in the eternal and the moment by
the obsessive idea of a shining nothingness.