Cesare Pavese Quotes
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Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.
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Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time - is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next.
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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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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.
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How can you have confidence in a woman who will not risk entrusting her whole life to you, day and night?
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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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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 cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.
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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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For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.
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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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The great lovers will always be unhappy, because for them love is great and so they ask of their beloved the same intensity of thought that they have for her – otherwise they feel betrayed.
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We can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts.
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In general, the man who is readily disposed to sacrifice himself is one who does not know how else to give meaning to his life. The profession of enthusiasm is the most sickening of all insincerities.
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If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.
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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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Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.
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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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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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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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Anchorites used to ill-treat themselves in the way they did, so that the common people would not begrudge them the beatitude they would enjoy in heaven.
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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.