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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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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We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word.
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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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From someone who doesn't want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette
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But all years are stupid. It's only when they're over that they become interesting.
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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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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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We obtain things when we no longer want them.
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The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities.
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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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Love is the cheapest of religions.
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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.
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You dont remember days, you remember moments
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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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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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Love is desire for knowledge.
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Don't you know that what happens to you once always happens again? You always react in the same way to the same thing. It's no accident when you make a mess. Then you do it again. It's called destiny.
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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.
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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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The world, the future, is now within you as your past, as experience, skill in technique, and the rich, everlasting mystery is found to be childish you that, at the time, you made no effort to possess.
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To know the world, one must construct it
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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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A corpse is what's left after waking too often.