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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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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All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.
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Lessons are not given, they are taken.
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We can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts.
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Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
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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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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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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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The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.
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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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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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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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Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there?
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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 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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War makes men barbarous because, to take part in it, one must harden oneself against all regret, all appreciation of delicacy and sensitive values. One must live as if those values did not exist, and when the war is over one has lost the resilience to return to those values.