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Cesare Pavese: 274 quotes20 likes

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

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

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

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“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.”

Cesare Pavese

Source: The house on the hill (1949), Chapter 8, p. 105

“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.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

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

Cesare Pavese

Source: The Beach (1941), Chapter 4, p. 24

“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.”

Cesare Pavese

Source: The house on the hill (1949), Chapter 16, p. 144

“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.”

Cesare Pavese

Source: The house on the hill (1949), Chapter 23, p. 176

“Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“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.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

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

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

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

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

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

Cesare Pavese

Source: The Beach (1941), Chapter 6, p. 36

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

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

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

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“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.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

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

Cesare Pavese

Source: The Beach (1941), Chapter 4, p. 27

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

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“The real affliction of old age is remorse.”

Cesare Pavese

Source: The moon and the bonfire (1950), Chapter VIII, p. 49

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

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“Don't mix wine and women, Doro.”

Cesare Pavese

Source: The Beach (1941), Chapter 2, p. 13