Cesare Pavese Quotes
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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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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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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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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 man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men's pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.
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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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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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A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.
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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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The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.
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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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Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man.
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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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The richness of life lies in the memories we have forgotten.
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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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From someone who doesn't want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette
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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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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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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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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 must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word.
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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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We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.