Cesare Pavese Quotes

“We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten”

“From someone who doesn't want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette”

“The only joy in the world is to begin.”

“Great lovers will always be unhappy, because, for them, love is of supreme importance. Consequently they demand of their beloved the same intensity of thought as they have for her, otherwise they feel betrayed.”

“What doesn't slumber under the shells of us all? One just needs courage to uncover it and be oneself. Or at least to discuss it. There isn't enough discussion in the world.”

“We were at the age when a friend's conversation seems like oneself talking, when one shares a life in common the way I still think, bachelor though I am, some married couples are able to live.”

“You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young.”

“The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one's own loneliness, how to communicate with others.”

“Men who have a tempestuous inner life and do not seek to give vent to it by talking or writing are simply men who have no tempestuous inner life.
Give company to a lonely man and he will talk more than anyone.”

“But she didn't laugh. "When you have children," she said, staring at her glass, "you accept life. Do you accept life?"”

“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.”

“We care so little of other people than even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God.”

“A love thought: I love you so much that I could wish I had been born your brother, or had brought you into the world myself.”

“Love has the faculty of making two lovers seem naked, not in each other's sight, but in their own.”

“I realised that Nuto was quite right when he said that to live in a hovel or in a palace was one and the same thing, that blood is the same colour everywhere, and that everybody wants to be rich and in love and make their fortune.”

“No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.”

“Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.”

“Things are revealed through the memories we have of them. Remembering a thing means seeing it—only then—for the first time.”

“There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.”

“The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves.”

“Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi. (Death will come and it will have your eyes.)”

“Anchorites used to ill-treat themselves in the way they did, so that the common people would not begrudge them the beatitude they would enjoy in heaven.”

“Maybe it's better like this, better that everything should go up in a blaze of dry grass and that people should begin again.”

“Many men on the point of an edifying death would be furious if they were suddenly restored to health.”

“We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest.”

“I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company.”

“To avenge a wrong done to you, is to rob yourself of the comfort of crying out against the injustice of it.”

“The courage to stand alone as if others didn't exist and think only of what you're doing. Not to get scared if people ignore you. You have to wait for years, have to die. Then after you're dead, if you're lucky, you become somebody.”

“There is no finer revenge than that which others inflict on your enemy. Moreover, it has the advantage of leaving you the role of a generous man.”

“If all this were true, how easy it would be to understand people.”

“Even today I wonder why those Germans didn't wait for me at the villa and send someone to look for me in Turin. It is because of their failure that I am still free and up here. Why I should have been saved and not Gallo, or Tono, or Cate, I don't know. Perhaps because I'm supposed to suffer for others? Because I'm the most useless and don't deserve anything, not even punishment? Because I went into a church that time? The experience of danger creates more cowards every day. It makes one stupid. I have reached the point of being alive only by chance, when many better men than I are dead, I don't like it, it's not enough. At time, after having listened to the useless radio and looked through the windows at the empty vineyards, I think that living by accident is not living, and I wonder if have really escaped.”

“But I have seen the unknown dead, those little men of the Republic. It was they who woke me up. If a stranger, an enemy, becomes a thing like that when he dies, if one stops short and is afraid to walk over him, it means that even beaten our enemy is someone, that after having shed his blood, one must placate it, give this blood a voice, justify the man who shed it. Looking at certain dead is humiliating. One has the impression that the same fate that threw these bodies to the ground holds us nailed to the spot to see them, to fill our eyes with the sight. It's not fear, not our usual cowardice. One feels humiliated because one understands–touching it with one's eyes–that we might be in their place ourselves: there would be no difference, and if we live we owe it to this dirtied corpse. That is why every war is a civil war; every fallen man resembles one who remains and calls him to account.”

“Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.”

“But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever.”

“You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering.”

“I started explaining to her that nothing is vulgar in itself but that talking and thinking make it so.”

“What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.”

“All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority, otherwise called ambition.”

“The act—the act—must not be a revenge. It must be a calm, weary renunciation, a closing of accounts, a private, rhythmic deed. The last remark.”

“Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.”

“The real affliction of old age is remorse.”

“Don't mix wine and women, Doro.”

“Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.”

“The whole plain was like a battlefield—or a farmyard. There was a reddish light and I jumped down, cramped and stiff with cold; a sliver of moon was piercing the low clouds and it looked like a gash from a knife and bathed the plain in a blood-red light. I stayed looking at it for a while. It terrified me.”

“Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there?”

“Nuto, who had never really gone away, still wanted to understand the world and change it, and upset the cycle of the seasons. Or perhaps he didn't, and still believed only in the moon. But I, who didn't believe in the moon, knew that when all was said and done only the seasons matter and they are in your bones and they nurtured you when you were a boy.”

“I thought of how many places there are in the world that belong in this way to someone, who has it in his blood beyond anyone else's understanding.”

“There is a reason why I came back to this place—came back here instead of to Canelli, Barbaresco or Alba. It is almost certain that I was not born here; where I was born I don't know. There is not a house or a bit of ground or a handful of dust hereabouts of which I can say: "This was me before I was born."”

“Are you or aren't you convinced that weakness is a man's condition? How can you raise yourself if you haven't fallen first?”

“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.”

“We obtain things when we no longer want them.”

“But all years are stupid. It's only when they're over that they become interesting.”

“In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.”

“It is stupid to grieve for the loss of a girl friend: you might never have met her, so you can do without her.”

“Not believing in anything is also a religion.”

“Certainly, to have a woman who waits at home for you, who will sleep with you, gives a warm feeling like having something you must say; it makes you glow, keeps you company, helps you to live.”

“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.”

“There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.”

“Things which cost nothing are those which cost the most. Why? Because they cost us the effort of understanding that they are free.”

“A dream is a creation of the intelligence, the creator being present but not knowing how it will end.”

“We were very young. I don't think I ever slept that year, but I had a friend who slept even less than I did. Some mornings you could see him strolling up and down in front of the station when the first trains were arriving and leaving.”

“When one has made a mistake, one says. "Another time I shall know what to do," when one should say is: "I already know what I shall really do another time."”

“A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.”

“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.”

“When a woman marries she belongs to another man; and when she belongs to another man there is nothing more you can say to her.”

“He told them it was only dogs that bark and go for strange dogs, and men set on a dog because it suits them to show that they are still masters, but if the dogs weren't dumb animals they would come to an agreements with each other and start barking at them.”