Salvatore Quasimodo Quotes

From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue.

The poet's spoken discourse often depends on a mystique, on the spiritual freedom that finds itself enslaved on earth.

He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.

The poet's other readers are the ancient poets, who look upon the freshly written pages from an incorruptible distance. Their poetic forms are permanent, and it is difficult to create new forms which can approach them.

An exact poetic duplication of a man is for the poet a negation of the earth, an impossibility of being, even though his greatest desire is to speak to many men, to unite with them by means of harmonious verses about the truths of the mind or of things.

Thus, the poet's word is beginning to strike forcefully upon the hearts of all men, while absolute men of letters think that they alone live in the real world.

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di sole:
ed e subito sera
Everyone stands alone at the heart of the world,
pierced by a ray of sunlight,
and suddenly it's evening

A poet clings to his own tradition and avoids internationalism.

As the poet has expected, the alarms now are sounded, for - and it must be said again - the birth of a poet is always a threat to the existing cultural order, because he attempts to break through the circle of literary castes to reach the center.

The antagonism between the poet and the politician has generally been evident in all cultures.

We wrote verses that condemned us, with no hope of pardon, to the most bitter solitude.

The poet does not fear death, not because he believes in the fantasy of heroes, but because death constantly visits his thoughts and is thus an image of a serene dialogue.

After the turbulence of death, moral principles and even religious proofs are called into question.

According to them, the poet is confined to the provinces with his mouth broken on his own syllabic trapeze.

In opposition to this detachment, he finds an image of man which contains within itself man's dreams, man's illness, man's redemption from the misery of poverty - poverty which can no longer be for him a sign of the acceptance of life.

The Sea Still Sounds
(Già da più notti s'ode ancora il mare)
Even more so at night the sea still sounds,
Lightly, up and down, along the smooth sands.
Echo of an enclosed voice in the mind,
that returns in time; and also that
assiduous lament of the gulls; birds
perhaps of the summits that April
drives towards the plain; already
you are near to me in that voice;
and I wish there might yet come to you
from me, an echo of memory,
like this dark murmur of the sea.

Europeans know the importance of the Resistance; it has been the shining example of the modern conscience.

Religious power, which, as I have already said, frequently identifies itself with political power, has always been a protagonist of this bitter struggle, even when it seemingly was neutral.

The Resistance is a moral certainty, not a poetic one. The true poet never uses words in order to punish someone. His judgment belongs to a creative order; it is not formulated as a prophetic scripture.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.