Cesare Pavese Quotes
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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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Are you or aren't you convinced that weakness is a man's condition? How can you raise yourself if you haven't fallen first?
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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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Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.
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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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All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.
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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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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.
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Lessons are not given, they are taken.
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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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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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We can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts.
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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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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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For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.
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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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The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.