Cesare Pavese Quotes

Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi. (Death will come and it will have your eyes.)

Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will.

Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.

Woman gives herself as a prize to the weak and as a prop to the strong and no man ever has what he should.

We can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts.

Dawn's faint breath breathes with your mouth at the ends of empty streets. Gray light your eyes, sweet drops of dawn on dark hills. Your steps and breath like the wind of dawn smother houses. The city shudders, Stones exhale— you are life, an awakening. Star lost in the light of dawn, trill of the breeze, warmth, breath— the night is done. You are light and morning.

All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.

The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.

Lessons are not given, they are taken.

Whatever people may say, the fastidious formal manner of the upper classes is preferable to the slovenly easygoing behaviour of the common middle class. In moments of crisis, the former know how to act, the latter become uncouth brutes.

One must look for one thing only, to find many.

The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.

When we read, we are not looking for new ideas, but to see our own thoughts given the seal of confirmation on the printed page. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves

The only joy in the world is to begin.

There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.

We never remember days, only moments.

We commit two wrongs when we fail to right a wrong.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.

But here's the worst part: the trick to life lies in hiding from those we hold most dear how much they mean to is; if not, we'd lose them.

Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else's body.

There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.

One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one's trouble does not make it any better.

Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

To choose a hardship for ourselves is our only defense against that hardship. This is what is meant by accepting suffering. Those who, by their very nature, can suffer completely, utterly, have an advantage. That is how we can disarm the power of suffering, make it our own creation, our own choice; submit to it. A justification for suicide.

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.

You don't remember days, you remember moments.

At great periods you have always felt, deep within you, the temptation to commit suicide. You gave yourself to it, breached your own defenses. You were a child. The idea of suicide was a protest against life; by dying, you would escape this longing for death.

Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.

Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.

When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.

Great lovers will always be unhappy, because, for them, love is of supreme importance. Consequently they demand of their beloved the same intensity of thought as they have for her, otherwise they feel betrayed.

The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.

A work settles nothing, just as the labor of a whole generation settles nothing. Sons, and the morrow, always start afresh.

There is only one pleasure-that of being alive. All the rest is misery.

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.

From someone who doesn't want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette

The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities.

Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.

Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.

Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next.

Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest - thought, action - is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go.

Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.

The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men's pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.