Life & Wisdom Quote by Salvatore Quasimodo

There is a faint accusation tucked into Quasimodo's phrasing: the novelist "settles" on men, as if choosing a limited quarry, then "imitates" them, as if art were a meticulous counterfeit rather than revelation. The bite is in that last clause - "he exhausts the possibilities of his characters" - which sounds like praise until you hear the strain. To exhaust is to wring dry. It suggests a writer who keeps turning a person over in his hands, testing every posture, every motive, until the character becomes less a living presence than a solved problem.

Quasimodo, a poet shaped by Hermeticism and the wreckage of early-20th-century Europe, is implicitly defending poetry's different economy. Poetry, in his tradition, doesn't simulate a whole social world; it concentrates experience until it becomes strange, resonant, and unrepeatable. The novel's ambition is breadth and continuity - the illusion of human completeness - and Quasimodo treats that ambition as both impressive and suspect. Imitation can be artistry, but it can also be a kind of conquest: to "exhaust" a character is to claim you can finally know a person.

The subtext lands as a warning about modern confidence. After a century that turned people into categories, statistics, targets, Quasimodo's language makes the novel's classic power - psychological mastery - sound perilously close to reduction. He's not dismissing storytelling; he's reminding us that a character who is fully accounted for may be, by definition, less human.