Primo Levi Quotes

“Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting." by Primo Levi in Drowned”

“I'm still angry with him, but I follow him through the drizzle anyway. Because this is Levi. This is my hero. And you always follow your heroes, even when you're mad, even when you'd rather punch them in the mouth. That's how trust works. It's blind and unconditional and it takes you places you can't reach by yourself.Just like love.”

“Maybe we should go on lots of double dates,” Cath said, “and then we can get married on the same day in a double ceremony, in matching dresses, and the four of us will light the unity candle all at the same time.”“Pfft,” Levi said, “I’m picking out my own dress.”

“A pair of jeans makes you feel good.A pair of Levis make you feel special!”

“You’re too focused. Too high-strung. Too…” Eros trails off as he continues to look into Levi’s blue eyes. “Too caught up with being in love.”

“Levi's gaze sought out Miss Spencer. Eden. All she had to do was smile to release those little frissons of lightning in him. As that thought crossed his mind, she glanced up, and Levi realized he was wrong. She didn't have to smile. All she had to do was look at him. Heaven help him. He was in bad.”

“Cath wanted to go back and rewrite every scene she'd ever written about Baz or Simon's chests. She'd written them flat and sharp and hard. Levi was all soft motion and breath, curves and warm hollows. Levi's chest was a living thing.”

“Afterwards, I will have to tie the trees to bamboo poles so the wind will not determine their shape. A tree cannot be given form by the vagaries of the wind.”

“My problem is that I want to smoke the cigar and for someone else to light it. I want to blow out smoke. Like a volcano. Like a monster. I want to fume. I do not want to be the girl whose job it is to wail in a high-pitched voice at funerals.”

“That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conquerer of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to maintain faithful to that nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed doen in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed! …[T]he chemistry and physics on which we fed, besides being in themselves nourishments vital in themselves, were the antidotes to Fascism … because they were clear and distinct and verifiable at every step, and not a tissue of lies and emptiness like the radio and newspapers.”