Cesare Pavese Quotes
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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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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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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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The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
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From someone who doesn't want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette
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Narrating incredible things as though they were real old system; narrating realities as though they were incredible the new.
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When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.
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We do not free ourselves from something by avoiding it, but only by living though it.
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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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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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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.
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You dont remember days, you remember moments
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What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.
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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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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 problem is not the harshness of Fate, for anything we want strongly enough we get. The trouble is rather that when we have it we grow sick of it, and then we should never blame Fate, only our own desire.
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We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest.
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It had to happen to you, to concentrate your whole life on one point, and then discover that you can do anything except live at that point.
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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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Love is the cheapest of religions.
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There is only one pleasure - that of being alive. All the rest is misery.
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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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All our "most sacred affections " are merely prosaic habit.