Cesare Pavese Quotes
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Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.
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All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.
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The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.
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What world lies beyond that stormy sea I do not know, but every ocean has a distant shore, and I shall reach it.
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The act the act must not be a revenge. It must be a calm, weary renunciation, a closing of accounts, a private, rhythmic deed. The last remark.
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The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.
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You need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. A village means that you are not alone, knowing that in the people, the trees, the earth, there is something that belongs to you, waiting for you when you are not there.
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No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.
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The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.
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Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.
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For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.
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Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.
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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.
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I was happy enough; I knew that during the night the whole city might go up in flames and all its people be killed, but the ravines, houses, and footpaths would wake in the morning calm and unchanged.
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When a woman marries she belongs to another man; and when she belongs to another man there is nothing more you can say to her.
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If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
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It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?
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Certainly, to have a woman who waits at home for you, who will sleep with you, gives a warm feeling like having something you must say; it makes you glow, keeps you company, helps you to live.
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A work settles nothing, just as the labor of a whole generation settles nothing. Sons, and the morrow, always start afresh.
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No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.
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You wait for nothing if not for the word that will burst from the deep like a fruit among branches.
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The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men's pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.
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Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there?
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There is no finer revenge than that which others inflict on your enemy. Moreover, it has the advantage of leaving you the role of a generous man.