Cesare Pavese Quotes
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The only joy in the world is to begin.
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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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Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.
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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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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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People who don't know any better will always be in the dark because the power lies in the hands of men who take good care that ordinary folk don't understand, in the hands, that is, of the government, of the clerical party, of the capitalists.
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The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.
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Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man.
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Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.
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A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.
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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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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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If it is true that one gets used to suffering, how is it that as the years go one always suffers more? No, they are not mad, those people who amuse themselves, enjoy life, travel, make love, fight they are not mad. We should like to do the same ourselves.
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From someone who doesn't want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette
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The richness of life lies in the memories we have forgotten.
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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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Many men on the point of an edifying death would be furious if they were suddenly restored to health.
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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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We want Realism's wealth of experience and Symbolism's depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites.
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We obtain things when we no longer want them.
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The face of the night will be an old wound that reopens each evening, impassive and living. The distant silence will ache like a soul, mute, in the dark. We'll speak to the night as it's whispering softly.
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You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering.
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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.