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We obtain things when we no longer want them.
Cesare Pavese -
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.
Cesare Pavese
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Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man.
Cesare Pavese -
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.
Cesare Pavese -
Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
Cesare Pavese -
A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.
Cesare Pavese -
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.
Cesare Pavese -
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.
Cesare Pavese
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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).
Cesare Pavese -
The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities.
Cesare Pavese -
You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering.
Cesare Pavese -
The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.
Cesare Pavese -
A decision, an action, are infallible omens of what we shall do another time, not for any vague, mystic, astrological reason but because they result from an automatic reaction that will repeat itself.
Cesare Pavese -
The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies. The fearful thing about it is that, not knowing what truth may be, we can still recognize lies.
Cesare Pavese
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Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next.
Cesare Pavese -
When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.
Cesare Pavese -
We want Realism's wealth of experience and Symbolism's depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites.
Cesare Pavese -
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.
Cesare Pavese -
What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.
Cesare Pavese -
We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word.
Cesare Pavese
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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.
Cesare Pavese -
Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.
Cesare Pavese -
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.
Cesare Pavese -
Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest - thought, action - is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go.
Cesare Pavese