Paolo Pasolini Quotes & Sayings

my religion was but a fragrance. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

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. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

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. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

The Church is the merciless heart of the State. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

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. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

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

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

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

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. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

The sense comes back to me of life
as it always was then, an affliction
even blinder because wondrously filled
with sweetness. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

I am not interested in deconsecrating: this is a fashion I hate, it is petit-bourgeois. I want to reconsecrate things as much as possible, I want to re-mythicize them. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

Truth lies not only in a dream, but in many dreams. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

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. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

Woe to him who doesn't know this Christian faith is bourgeois. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

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. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

We survive, in the confusion
of a life reborn beyond reason. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

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

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 ... — Pier Paolo Pasolini

I think to scandalize is a right, to be scandalized is a pleasure, and those who refuse to be scandalized are moralists. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

Football is the last sacred ritual of our time. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

Death does determine life. Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous. However, to be sincere I must add that for me death is important only if it is not justified and rationalized by reason. For me death is the maximum of epicness and death. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

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

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. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

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

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. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

First the mania for confession,
then the mania for clarity,
issued from you, dark, hypocritical
sentiment! Let them now
condemn my every passion, let them
drag me through the mud, call me twisted,
foul pervert, dilettante, perjurer;
you keep me apart, give me life's assurance:
I burn at the stake, play the card of fire
and win: I win this small,
vast possession, my infinite,
miserable pity
which makes even righteous anger my friend.
And I can do this because I've endured you too long! — Pier Paolo Pasolini

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. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

The revolution is now just a sentiment. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

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. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

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. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

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

Death does determine life. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

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. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

Every day my anxiety is higher,
every day the grief more mortal.
Today more than yesterday terror exalts me ... — Pier Paolo Pasolini

I don't believe we shall ever again have any form of society in which men will be free. One should not hope for it. One should not hope for anything. Hope is invented by politicians to keep the electorate happy. — Pier Paolo Pasolini