Logic is one thing, the human animal another. You can quite easily propose a logical solution to something and at the same time hope in your heart of hearts it won't work out.
Luigi PirandelloRead
Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!
Interpretation
A true character can transcend life and death, as the creations of a writer endure beyond their existence.
This quote by Luigi Pirandello emphasizes the idea that while a person's physical life may come to an end, the characters they create through their art have a timeless quality. Characters created by a writer possess a life of their own, allowing them to exist and resonate with audiences long after the writer is gone, ultimately achieving a kind of immortality through storytelling.
In practice
In a speech about the impact of literature, one might quote this to highlight the enduring influence of characters in storytelling.
Logic is one thing, the human animal another. You can quite easily propose a logical solution to something and at the same time hope in your heart of hearts it won't work out.
We're like so many puppets hung on the wall, waiting for someone to come and move us or make us talk.
Woe to him who doesn't know how to wear his mask, be he king or pope!
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.
A fact is like a sack - it won't stand up if it's empty. To make it stand up, first you have to put in it all the reasons and feelings that caused it in the first place.
Anyone can be heroic from time to time, but a gentleman is something you have to be all the time.
My chief virtue (or if you like, defect) has been a tireless lifelong search for an original, individual musical idiom. I detest imitation, I detest hackneyed devices.
Generally, literary prizes are significant not for who the winner is but the discussion they create around books.
Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.
History has proven that art depicting black people cannot be disentangled from the political implications that such art has on their lives. As Africans were being stripped from the continent and sailed across the Atlantic to the Western world, depictions of black people in Western art changed in order to further render them racialized caricatures.
The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.
Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.