Cesare Pavese: Trending quotes (page 2)

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“Don't mix wine and women, Doro.”