Cesare Pavese citations

“Attendre est encore une occupation. C'est ne rien attendre qui est terrible.”

“L’art est la preuve que la vie ne suffit pas.”

“Tu seras aimé le jour où tu pourras montrer tes faiblesses sans que l'autre s'en serve pour affirmer sa force.”

“Il y a une chose plus triste que d'avoir raté ses idéaux, c'est de les avoir réalisés.”

“Il arrive qu'une femme rencontre une épave et qu'elle décide d'en faire un homme sain. Elle y réussit parfois. Il arrive qu'une femme rencontre un homme sain et décide d'en faire une épave. Elle y réussit toujours.”

“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.”

“What world lies beyond that stormy sea I do not know, but every ocean has a distant shore, and I shall reach it.”

“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.”

“Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“No woman marries for money: they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”