Cesare Pavese citations

Page 4

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“There is something indecent in words.”

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Love is desire for knowledge.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

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

“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.”

“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.”