Cesare Pavese Quotes
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Cesare Pavese was an Italian poet, novelist, literary critic and translator. He is widely considered among the major authors of the 20th century in his home country.

Wikipedia

✵ 9. September 1908 – 27. August 1950  •  Other names Caesare Pavese

Cesare Pavese photo

Cesare Pavese: 137 quotes20 likes

Cesare Pavese Quotes

“The man of action is not the headstrong fool who rushes into danger with no thought for himself, but the man who puts into practice the things he knows.”

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“We want Realism's wealth of experience and Symbolism's depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites.”

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“I don't believe it can end. Now that I've seen what war is, what civil war is, I know that everybody, if one day it should end, ought to ask himself: "And what shall we make of the fallen? Why are they dead?" I wouldn't know what to say. Not now, at any rate. Nor does it seem to me that the others know. Perhaps only dead know, and only for them is the war really over.”

Ending words
The house on the hill (1949)

“I've discovered nothing. but do you remember how much we talked when we were boys? We talked just for the fun of it. We knew very well it was only talk, but still we enjoyed it.”

Source: The Beach (1941), Chapter 4, p. 25

“Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.”

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“Consider this point carefully: nowadays, suicide is just a way of disappearing. It is carried out timidly, quietly, and falls flat. It is no longer an action, only a submission.”

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“Since God could have created a freedom in which there could be no evil (i. e., a state when men were happy and free and certain not to sin), it follows that He wished evil to exist. But evil offends Him. A commonplace case of masochism.”

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“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.”

Source: The devil in the hills (1949), Chapter 11, p. 327

“There's nothing that tastes of death more than the summer sun, the powerful light, exuberant nature. You sniff the air and listen to the woods and know that the plants and animals don't give a damn about you. Everything lives and consumes itself. Nature is death…”

Source: The devil in the hills (1949), Chapter 7, p. 311

“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.”

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.”

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?”

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."”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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?”

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.”

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.”

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

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

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

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

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.”

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.”

Incipit
The house on the hill (1949)

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

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“There is something indecent in words.”

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”

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.”

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“The most banal thing, discovered in ourselves, becomes intensely interesting. It is no longer an abstract banality, but an amazing co-ordination between reality and our own individuality.”

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“The really clever thing, in affairs of this sort, is not to win a woman already desired by everyone, but to discover such a prize while she is still unknown.”

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“What use is this valley to a family that comes from across the sea and knows nothing about the moon and the bonfires? You must have grown up there and have in in your bones, like wine and polenta, and then you know it without needing to speak about it and everything you have carried about inside you for so many years without knowing awakens now at the rattle of the chain on a cart, at the swish of an ox' tail, at the taste of a bowl of minestra, at the sound of a voice heard in the square at night.”

Source: The moon and the bonfire (1950), Chapter X, p. 56

“This much is certain: you can have anything in life except a wife to call you "her man." And till now all your life was based on that hope.”

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“There is only one pleasure—that of being alive. All the rest is misery.”

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“All of them, all those idiots who force their brains and don't know when to stop.”

Source: The Beach (1941), Chapter 4, p. 26

“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.”

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“Death is repose, but the thought of death disturbs all repose.”

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“For some time my friend Doro and I had agreed that I would be his guest. I was very fond of Doro, and when he married and went to Genoa to live, I was half sick over it. When I wrote to refuse his invitation to the wedding, I got a dry and rather haughty note replying that if his money wasn't good for establishing himself in a city that pleased his wife, he didn't know what it was good for. Then, one fine day as I was passing through Genoa I stopped at his house and we made peace. I liked his wife very much, a tomboy type who graciously asked me to call her Clelia and left us alone as much as she should, and when she showed up again in the evening to go out with us, she had become a charming woman whose hand I would have kissed had I been anyone else but myself.”

Incipit
The Beach (1941)

“That you need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. Your own village means that you're not alone, that you know there's something of you in the people and the plants and the soil, that even when you are not there it waits to welcome you.”

Source: The moon and the bonfire (1950), Chapter I, p. 9

“What's got into your head? That I'm returning to my origins? The important things I have in my blood and nobody is going to take them away. I'm here to drink a bottle of my wine and sing a little–with anybody.”

Source: The Beach (1941), Chapter 2, p. 9

“Even then he had those piercing cat's eyes of his and when he had said something, finished up by saying: "If I'm wrong, put me right." And so I began to understand that you didn't speak for the sake of speaking, to say that you had done this or that, what you had eaten or drunk, but to work out an idea, to find out what makes the world go round.”

Source: The moon and the bonfire (1950), Chapter XVII, p. 98

“Love is desire for knowledge.”

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.”

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“The thing most feared in secret always happens.
I write: oh Thou, have mercy. And then?
All it takes is a little courage.
The more the pain grows clear and definite, the more the instinct for life asserts itself and the thought of suicide recedes.
It seemed easy when I thought of it. Weak women have done it. It takes humility, not pride.
All this is sickening.
Not words. An act. I won't write any more.”

, end. Nine days later he committed suicide, leaving this message: «I forgive everyone and to everyone I ask forgiveness. Well enough? Don't gossip too much».
This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“War makes men barbarous because, to take part in it, one must harden oneself against all regret, all appreciation of delicacy and sensitive values. One must live as if those values did not exist, and when the war is over one has lost the resilience to return to those values.”

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“See, you're like all the others. But don't you understand that we can't quarrel? We love each other. If I could hate him the way I hate myself, then of course I would abuse him. But neither of us deserves it. See?”

Source: The Beach (1941), Chapter 3, p. 20

“There is nothing fine about being a child: it is fine, when we are old, too look back to when we were children.”

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“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.”

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“It is not that things happen to each of us according to his fate, but that he interprets what has happened, if he has power to do so, according to his sense of his own destiny.”

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“That war in which I had been sheltering, convinced of having accepted it, of having made my own uncomfortable peace, grew more ferocious, bit deeper, reached into one's nerves and brain.”

Source: The house on the hill (1949), Chapter 13, p. 125

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