Cesare Pavese Quotes
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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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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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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 slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.
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The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
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Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man.
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The only joy in the world is to begin.
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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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A consoling thought: what matters is not what we do, but the spirit in which we do it. Others suffer too; so much so that there is nothing in the world but suffering; the problem is simply to keep a clear conscience.
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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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But here's the worst part: the trick to life lies in hiding from those we hold most dear how much they mean to is; if not, we'd lose them.
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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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We obtain things when we no longer want them.
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Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.
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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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Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.
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At great periods you have always felt, deep within you, the temptation to commit suicide. You gave yourself to it, breached your own defenses. You were a child. The idea of suicide was a protest against life; by dying, you would escape this longing for death.
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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.
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The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning, always, every moment.
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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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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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Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.