Cesare Pavese Quotes
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The problems that agitate one generation are exstinguished for the next, not because they have been solved but because the general lack of interest sweeps them away.
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In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.
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One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love – any love – reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.
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To avenge a wrong done to you, is to rob yourself of the comfort of crying out against the injustice of it.
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Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.
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We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
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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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No matter how much a young man likes to think for himself, he is always trying to model himself on some abstract pattern largely derived from the example of the world around him. And a man, no matter how conservative, shows his own worth by his personal deviation from that pattern.
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Woman gives herself as a prize to the weak and as a prop to the strong and no man ever has what he should.
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There is something indecent in words
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Maybe it's better like this, better that everything should go up in a blaze of dry grass and that people should begin again.
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The richness of life lies in the memories we have forgotten.
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Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.
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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.
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We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word.
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In fact a man in love or one consumed with hatred creates symbols for himself, as a superstitious man does, from a passion of conferring uniqueness on things or persons. A man who knows nothing of symbols is one of Dante's sluggards. This is why art mirrors itself in primitive rites or strong passions, seeking for symbols, revolving round the primitive taste for savagery, for what is irrational (blood and sex).
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When a man mourns for someone who has played him false, it is not for love of her, but for his own humiliation at not having deserved her trust.
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A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.
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The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one's own loneliness, how to communicate with others.
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You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering.
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But all years are stupid. It's only when they're over that they become interesting.
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Nowadays, suicide is just a way of disappearing. It is carried out timidly, quietly, and falls flat. It is no longer an action, only a submission.
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The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.
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It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to be no longer obsessed by it.