Pirandello Quotes

Life is full of strange absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.

Whatever is a reality today, whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be, like the reality of yesterday, an illusion tomorrow.

If only we could see in advance all the harm that can come from the good we think we are doing.

THE FATHER: But don't you see that the whole trouble lies here? In words, words. Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself. We think we understand each other, but we never really do.

Our spirits have their own private way of understanding each other, of becoming intimate, while our external persons are still trapped in the commerce of ordinary words, in the slavery of social rules. Souls have their own needs and their own ambitions, which the body ignores when it sees that it's impossible to satisfy them or achieve them.

Inevitably we construct ourselves. Let me explain. I enter this house and immediately I become what I have to become, what I can become: I construct myself. That is, I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve with you. And, of course, you do the same with me.

It is so.When YOU think so

Imparerai a tue spese che nel lungo tragitto della vita incontrerai tante maschere e pochi volti.

I read a lot. I listen a lot. I think a lot. But so little remains. The books I read, their plots, their protagonists fade. The university lectures that I had found pretty impressive on first hearing, have faded away. Now I am listening to one on Pirandello. Names of people, books, cities. They are already fading away. Even the titles of films I’ve seen recently — they have already faded. Authors of thousands of books I’ve read... All that remains are the colours of their bindings, their covers. I don’t remember much about Beauty and the Beast, but I remember clearly, vividly the hear of the day as we were crossing the Rhine bridge, to see the film. Everything that I see, or red, or listen to, connects, translates into moods, bits of surroundings, colors. No, I am not a novelist. No precision of observation, detail. With me, everything is mood, mood, or else —simply nothingness.

The capacity for deluding ourselves that today's reality is the only true one, on the one hand, sustains us, but on the other, it plunges us into an endless void, because today's reality is destined to prove delusion for us tomorrow; and life doesn't conclude. It can't conclude. Tomorrow if it concludes, it's finished.

I am an "unrealized" character, dramatically speaking...

For man never reasons so much and becomes so introspective as when he suffers ; since he is anxious to get at the cause of his sufferings, to learn who has produced them, and whether it is just or unjust that he should have to bear them. On the other hand, when he is happy, he takes his happiness as it comes and doesn't analyse it, just as if happiness were his right.

my real love has always been the sleep that rescued me by allowing me to dream.

We all have a world of things inside ourselves and each one of us has his own private world. How can we understand each other if the words I use have the sense and the value that I expect them to have, but whoever is listening to me inevitably thinks that those same words have a different sense and value, because of the private world he has inside himself, too.

E l’amore guardò il tempo e rise, perché sapeva di non averne bisogno. Finse di morire per un giorno, e di rifiorire alla sera, senza leggi da rispettare. Si addormentò in un angolo di cuore per un tempo che non esisteva. Fuggì senza allontanarsi, ritornò senza essere partito, il tempo moriva e lui restava.

Do you recognize perhaps, also you, now, that a minute ago you were another?

When a character is born, he acquires at once such an independence, even of his own author, that he can be imagined by everybody even in many other situations where the author never dreamed of placing him; and so he acquires for himself a meaning which the author never thought of giving him.

I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve to you.

You don’t appreciate the fact that madmen are very lucky.

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

No name. No memory today of yesterday’s name; of today’s name, tomorrow. If the name is the thing; if a name in us is the concept of every thing placed outside of us; and without a name you don’t have the concept, and the thing remains in us as if blind, indistinct and undefined: well then, let each carve this name that I bore among men, a funeral epigraph, on the brow of that image in which I appeared to him, and then leave it in peace, and let there be no more talk about it. It is fitting for the dead. For those who have concluded. I am alive and I do not conclude. Life does not conclude. And life knows nothing of names. This tree, tremulous pulse of new leaves. I am this tree. Tree, cloud; tomorrow book or wind: the book I read, the wind I drink. All outside, wandering.

And no one realizes we should all, always, look like that, each with his eyes full of horror at his own, inescapable solitude.

The idea that others saw in me one that was not the I whom I knew, one whom they alone could know, as they looked at me from without, with eyes that were not my own, eyes that conferred upon me an aspect destined to remain always foreign to me, although it was one that was in me, one that was my own to them (a "mine," that is to say, that was not for me!)—a life into which, although it was my own, I had no power to penetrate—this idea gave me no rest.

The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die.

And the air is new. And everything, instant by instant, is as it is, preparing to appear. [...] This is the only way I can live now. To be reborn moment by moment. [...] I die at every instant, and I am reborn, new and without memories: live and whole, no longer inside myself, but in every thing outside.

A lot of novelists start late—Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you're young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can't be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don't know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter.

Le anime hanno un loro particolar modo d'intendersi, d'entrare in intimità, fino a darsi del tu, mentre le nostre persone sono tuttavia impacciate nel commercio delle parole comuni, nella schiavitù delle esigenze sociali. Han bisogni lor proprii e le loro proprie aspirazioni le anime, di cui il corpo non si dà per inteso, quando veda l'impossibilità di soddisfarli e di tradurle in atto. E ogni qualvolta due che comunichino fra loro così, con le anime soltanto, si trovano soli in qualche luogo, provano un turbamento angoscioso e quasi una repulsione violenta d'ogni minimo contatto materiale, una sofferenza che li allontana, e che cessa subito, non appena un terzo intervenga. Allora, passata l'angoscia, le due anime sollevate si ricercano e tornano a sorridersi da lontano.

Ma che colpa abbiamo, io e voi, se le parole, per sè, sono vuote?...E voi le riempite del senso vostro, nel dirmele, e io nell'accoglierle, inevitabilmente, le riempio del senso mio. Abbiamo creduto d'intenderci, non ci siamo intesi affatto.

The unfortunate part is that you, my dear friend, will never know, and I shall never be able to tell you, how what you say to me is translated inside me. You did not speak Turkish, no. We both employed, you and I, the same language, the same words. But is it our fault, yours and mine, if words in themselves are empty? Empty, my dear friend. You fill them with your meaning, as you speak them to me; while I, in taking them in, inevitably fill them with my own. We thought we understood each other; we did not understand each other at all.

This is the real drama for me; the belief that we all, you see, think of ourselves as one single person: but it's not true: each of us is several different people, and all these people live inside us. With one person we seem like this and with another we seem very different. But we always have the illusion of being the same person for everybody and of always being the same person in everything we do. But it's not true! It's not true! We find this out for ourselves very clearly when by some terrible chance we're suddenly stopped in the middle of doing something and we're left dangling there, suspended. We realize then, that every part of us was not involved in what we'd been doing and that it would be a dreadful injustice of other people to judge us only by this one action as we dangle there, hanging in chains, fixed for all eternity, as if the whole of one's personality were summed up in that single, interrupted action.

Io sono vivo e non concludo.La vita non conclude.E non sa di nomi, la vita. Quest’albero, respiro tremulo di foglie nuove. Sono quest’albero. Albero, nuvola; domani libro o vento: il libro che leggo, il vento che bevo. Tutto fuori, vagabondo.

Thus, sir, you see when faith is lacking, it becomes impossible to create certain states of happiness, for we lack the necessary humility. Vaingloriously, we try to substitute ourselves for this faith, creating thus for the rest of the world a reality which we believe after their fashion, while, actually, it doesn't exist.

Abbiamo tutti dentro un mondo di cose: ciascuno un suo mondo di cose! E come possiamo intenderci, signore, se nelle parole ch'io dico metto il senso e il valore delle cose come sono dentro di me; mentre chi le ascolta, inevitabilmente le assume col senso e col valore che hanno per sé, del mondo com'egli l'ha dentro? Crediamo di intenderci; non ci intendiamo mai!

But only in order to know if you, as you really are now, see yourself as you once were with all the illusions that were yours then, with all the things both inside and outside of you as they seemed to you - as they were then indeed for you. Well, sir, if you think of all those illusions that mean nothing to you now, of all those things which don't even seem to you to exist any more, while once they were for you, don't you feel that - I won't say these boards - but the very earth under your feet is sinking away from you when you reflect that in the same way this you as you feel it today - all this present reality of yours - is fated to seem a mere illusion to you tomorrow?

La solitudine non è mai con voi; è sempre senza di voi, e soltanto possibile con un estraneo attorno: luogo o persona che sia, che del tutto vi ignorino, che del tutto voi ignoriate, così che la vostra volontà e il vostro sentimento restino sospesi e smarriti in un’incertezza angosciosa e, cessando ogni affermazione di voi, cessi l’intimità stessa della vostra coscienza. La vera solitudine è in un luogo che vive per sé e che per voi non ha traccia né voce, e dove dunque l’estraneo siete voi

Fate, fortune, chance: all snares of life. You want to be, eh? There’s this catch: in abstract, you cannot just be. The being must be trapped in a form, and for some time it has to stay in it, here or there, this way or that. And everything, as long as it lasts, bears the penalty of its form, the penalty of being this way and no longer being able to be otherwise.

Voi credete di conoscervi se non vi costruite in qualche modo? E ch'io possa conoscervi, se non vi costruisco a modo mio? E voi me, se non mi costruite a modo vostro? Possiamo conoscere soltanto quello a cui riusciamo a dar forma. Ma che conoscenza può essere? È forse questa forma la cosa stessa? Sì, tanto per me, quanto per voi; ma non così per me quanto per voi: tanto vero che io non mi riconosco nella forma che mi date voi, né voi in quella che vi do io.

Era proprio la mia quell’immagine intravista in un lampo? Sono proprio così io, di fuori, quando vivendo - non mi penso? Dunque per gli altri sono quell’estraneo sospeso nello specchio: quello, e non già quale io mi conosco: quell’uno lì che io stesso prima, scorgendolo, non ho riconosciuto. Sono quell’estraneo che non posso veder vivere se non così, in un attimo impensato. Un estraneo che possono vedere e conoscere solamente gli altri, e io no.

Solitude is never where you are; it is always where you are not, and is only possible with a stranger present; whatever the place or whoever the person, it must be one that is wholly ignorant concerning you, and concerning which or whom you are equally ignorant, so that will and sensation remain suspended and confused in an anxious uncertainty, while with the ceasing of all affirmation on your part, your own inner consciousness ceases at the same time. True solitude is to be found in a place that lives a life of its own, but which for you holds no familiar footprint, speaks in no known voice, and where accordingly the stranger is yourself.

وقضيتي كانت أفدح. فأنا لا أرى ما مات فيّ. ولكني أرى أني لم أعش أبداً. أرى أن القالب الذي أفرغت فيه حياتي، إنما أعطاه لها الآخرون، ولست أنا الذي صغتها فيه، فأنا أشعر أن حياة هذا القالب، لم تكن حياتي الحقيقية. لقد أخذوني كأية مادة، أخذوا دماغاً وروحاً وعضلات وأعصاباً ولحماً، وعجنوها على النحو الذي يريدونه حتى تنجز أعمالاً، وتقوم بأفعال، وتطيع الواجبات التي أبحث عن نفسي فيها فلا أجدها. وأصرخ، وتصرخ روحي في هذه الهيئة الميتة التي لم تكن هيئتي أبداً. ولكن كيف، وفي نفسي سأم وحقد ورعب من هذا الرجل الذي لم أكنه. من هذا القالب المميت الذي يقيدني فلا أقدر على التحرر. إنه قالب مثقل بالواجبات التي أشعر أنها ليست واجباتي. مرهق بأعمال لا تهمني، متخذ كرمز للتقدير الذي لا أعرف ما أصنع به. إن هذه الواجبات والأعمال والتقدير والإحترام صور خارجة عن حقيقة نفسي، إنها أشياء ميتة، لا معنى لها، إلا أن تثقل كاهلي، وترهقني وتسحقني، ولا تدع لي الفرصة للتنفس. أتحرر؟؟ ولكن متى استطاع إنسان إلغاء الحقيقة الواقعة فينكر الموت عندما يأخذ بخناقه .. والحقيقة أنه مهما كان مسلكك في الحياة فلا بد أن تقيدك المحن التي يجرها عليك. وتحيط بك تلك المسؤولية التي أخذتها على عاتقك كنها الجو الخانق الكثيف. فكيف أستطيع التحرر، وأنا سجين هذا القالب الغريب الذي يمثلني كما أنا بالنسبة للجميع، وكما يعرفني ويحترمني الجميع؟ إنني أعيش حياة مختلفة عن تلك الحقيقة التي أحلم بها. إنني أعيش حياتي في قالب أشعر أنه ميت وهو يعيش من أجل الآخرين. من أجل الذين رفعوه والذين يريدون له هذه الصورة .. فهو مرغم إذاً على أن يعمل من أجل زوجتي وأطفالي والمجتمع والسادة طلاب الحقوق في الجامعة والسادة العملاء الذين أودعوني الحياة والشرف والحرية والثروة. يعمل هكذا ولا أستطيع تغييره ولا أستطيع أن أركله بالأقدام وأزيحه وأتمرد عليه وأنتقم منه.