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Cesare Pavese: 274 quotes20 likes

“All our "most sacred affections" are merely prosaic habit.”

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“We do not free ourselves from something by avoiding it, but only by living though it.”

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“At a certain point the two cigars fell at our feet in the snow and then we heard them whispering up there and moving about and then came a sigh louder than the others. When we looked up we could see nothing but the withered vine leaves and thousands of stars in the frosty sky. Nuto said "The blackguards" through his clenched teeth.”

Cesare Pavese

Source: The moon and the bonfire (1950), Chapter XXIII, p. 133

“The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning, always, every moment. When this sensation is lacking—as when one is in prison, or ill, or stupid, or when living has become a habit—one might as well be dead.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“Why does a man who is truly in love insist that this relationship must continue and be "lifelong"? Because life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic. Who would want to wake up halfway through an operation?”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“It wasn't a country where a man could settle down and rest his head and say to the others, "Here I am for good or ill. For good or ill let me leave in peace."”

Cesare Pavese

This was what was frightening.
Source: The moon and the bonfire (1950), Chapter III, p. 22

“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.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“I was happy enough; I knew that during the night the whole city might go up in flames and all its people be killed, but the ravines, houses, and footpaths would wake in the morning calm and unchanged.”

Cesare Pavese

Source: The house on the hill (1949), Chapter 1, p. 63

“In general, the man who is readily disposed to sacrifice himself is one who does not know how else to give meaning to his life.
The profession of enthusiasm is the most sickening of all insincerities.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“How can you have confidence in a woman who will not risk entrusting her whole life to you, day and night?”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“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.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“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.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“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.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“For a long time we had talked of the hill as we might have talked of the sea or the woods. I used to go back there in the evening from the city when it grew dusk, and for me it was not just another place but a point of view, a way of life. For instance, I saw no difference between those hills and these ancient ones where I played as a child and where I live now: the same broken, straggling country, cultivated and wild, the same roads, farmhouses, and ravines. I used to climb up there in the evening as if I too were fleeing the nightly shock of the air-raid alarms.”

Cesare Pavese

Incipit
The house on the hill (1949)

“Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“There is something indecent in words.”

Cesare Pavese

Source: The house on the hill (1949), Chapter 13, p. 126

“In fact a man in love or one consumed with hatred creates symbols for himself, as a superstitious man does, from a passion of conferring uniqueness on things or persons. A man who knows nothing of symbols is one of Dante's sluggards. This is why art mirrors itself in primitive rites or strong passions, seeking for symbols, revolving round the primitive taste for savagery, for what is irrational”

Cesare Pavese

blood and sex
This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“Nothing can be added to the rest, to the past. We always begin afresh.
One nail drives out another. But four nails make a cross.”

Cesare Pavese

This Business of Living (1935-1950)