Pavese Quotes & Sayings

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

Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next. — Cesare Pavese

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

Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world. — Cesare Pavese

It is stupid to grieve for the loss of a girl friend: you might never have met her, so you can do without her. — Cesare Pavese

Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference. — Cesare Pavese

There is only one pleasure-that of being alive. All the rest is misery. — Cesare Pavese

For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries. — Cesare Pavese

The whole problem of life is this: how to break out of one's own solitude, how to communicate with others. — Cesare Pavese

At great periods you have always felt, deep within you, the temptation to commit suicide. You gave yourself to it, breached your own defenses. You were a child. The idea of suicide was a protest against life; by dying, you would escape this longing for death. — Cesare Pavese

Life is not a search for experience, but for ourselves. Having discovered our own fundamental level we realize that it conforms to our own destiny and we find peace. — Cesare Pavese

It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative? — Cesare Pavese

We care so little of other people than even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God . — Cesare Pavese

Maybe it's better like this, better that everything should go up in a blaze of dry grass and that people should begin again. — Cesare Pavese

One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one's trouble does not make it any better. — Cesare Pavese

There is mercy for everyone, except those who are bored with life. — Cesare Pavese

Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest - thought, action - is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go. — Cesare Pavese

We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest. — Cesare Pavese

One must look for one thing only, to find many. — Cesare Pavese

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. — Cesare Pavese

Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism. — Cesare Pavese

All is the same
time has gone by
some day you come
some day you'll die
someone has died
long time ago. — Cesare Pavese

We never remember days, only moments. — Cesare Pavese

It's pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone ... — Cesare Pavese

Love is the cheapest of religions. — Cesare Pavese

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. — Cesare Pavese

We do not free ourselves from something by avoiding it, but only by living though it. — Cesare Pavese

From someone who doesn't want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette — Cesare Pavese

And then we cowards
who loved the whispering
evening, the houses,
the paths by the river,
the dirty red lights
of those places, the sweet
soundless sorrow
we reached our hands out
toward the living chain
in silence, but our heart
startled us with blood,
and no more sweetness then,
no more losing ourselves
on the path by the river
no longer slaves, we knew
we were alone and alive.
(Translated By Geoffrey Brock) — Cesare Pavese

Death Will Come with Your Eyes"

Death will come with your eyes -
this death that accompanies us
from morning till night, sleepless,
deaf, like an old regret
or a stupid vice. Your eyes
will be a useless word,
a muted cry, a silence.
As you see them each morning
when alone you lean over
the mirror. O cherished hope,
that day we too shall know
that you are life and nothing.

For everyone death has a look.
Death will come with your eyes.
It will be like terminating a vice,
as seen in the mirror
a dead face re-emerging,
like listening to closed lips.
We'll go down the abyss in silence. — Cesare Pavese

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic. — Cesare Pavese

All our "most sacred affections " are merely prosaic habit. — Cesare Pavese

You wait for nothing if not for the word that will burst from the deep like a fruit among branches. — Cesare Pavese

Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast. — Cesare Pavese

Narrating incredible things as though they were real old system; narrating realities as though they were incredible the new. — Cesare Pavese

Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long. — Cesare Pavese

Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd. — Cesare Pavese

The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning, always, every moment. — Cesare Pavese

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. — Cesare Pavese

A corpse is what's left after waking too often. — Cesare Pavese

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

Not believing in anything is also a religion . — Cesare Pavese

It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to be no longer obsessed by it. — Cesare Pavese

There is something indecent in words . — Cesare Pavese

But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever. — Cesare Pavese

Whatever people may say, the fastidious formal manner of the upper classes is preferable to the slovenly easygoing behaviour of the common middle class. In moments of crisis, the former know how to act, the latter become uncouth brutes. — Cesare Pavese

Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man — Cesare Pavese

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

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

Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time - is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next. — Cesare Pavese

The face of the night will be an old wound that reopens each evening, impassive and living. The distant silence will ache like a soul, mute, in the dark. We'll speak to the night as it's whispering softly. — Cesare Pavese

You are like a cloud
Glimpsed between the branches. In your eyes there shines
The strangeness of a sky that isn't yours. — Cesare Pavese

All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition. — Cesare Pavese

Meanwhile we arrived at our lane and the sight of the olive tree rubbed me the wrong way. I began to see that no spot is less habitable than a place where one has been happy. — Cesare Pavese

Are you or aren't you convinced that weakness is a man's condition? How can you raise yourself if you haven't fallen first? — Cesare Pavese

What we desire is not to possess a woman, but to be the only one to possess her. — Cesare Pavese

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. — Cesare Pavese

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped. — Cesare Pavese

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. — Cesare Pavese

Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference. — Cesare Pavese

The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal. — Cesare Pavese

I am the captain of my destiny, I do not abandon the ship in hard times, But, I do have sense enough not to go down with the ship. — Cesare Pavese

The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one's own loneliness, how to communicate with others. — Cesare Pavese

When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of. — Cesare Pavese

The only joy in the world is to begin. — Cesare Pavese

There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him. — Cesare Pavese

No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first. — Cesare Pavese

A consoling thought: what matters is not what we do, but the spirit in which we do it. Others suffer too; so much so that there is nothing in the world but suffering; the problem is simply to keep a clear conscience. — Cesare Pavese

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends.
You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it. — Cesare Pavese

The thing most feared in secret always happens ... All it needs 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 needs humility not pride. I am sickened by all this. Not words. Action. I shall write no more. — Cesare Pavese

The only reason why we are always thinking of our own ego is that we have to live with it more continuously than with anyone else's. — Cesare Pavese

Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared. — Cesare Pavese

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

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

Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce. — Cesare Pavese

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

You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young. — Cesare Pavese

Love is desire for knowledge. — Cesare Pavese

The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come. — Cesare Pavese

Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman. — Cesare Pavese

We don't remember days,we remember moments. — Cesare Pavese

When a man mourns for someone who has played him false, it is not for love of her, but for his own humiliation at not having deserved her trust. — Cesare Pavese

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

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. — Cesare Pavese

The cadence of suffering has begun. — Cesare Pavese

Certainly, to have a woman who waits at home for you, who will sleep with you, gives a warm feeling like having something you must say; it makes you glow, keeps you company, helps you to live. — Cesare Pavese

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. — Cesare Pavese

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

Because, to despise money, one must have plenty of it. — Cesare Pavese

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. — Cesare Pavese

Woman gives herself as a prize to the weak and as a prop to the strong and no man ever has what he should. — Cesare Pavese

Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there? — Cesare Pavese

The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it. — Cesare Pavese

We can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts. — Cesare Pavese

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state. — Cesare Pavese

In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid. — Cesare Pavese

If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears. — Cesare Pavese

Indifference

This hate has blossomed like a living love,
grieving, watching its own exhaustion.
It seeks a face, it seeks flesh, as though it were love.

The worldly flesh and the voices that spoke
are dead, all has shuddered away,
all life hangs on a voice.
Days pass in bitter ecstasy to the sad
caress of the voice that returns
and drains the blood from our faces. Not without sweetness
that voice returns to the mind exhausted
and trembling: once it trembled for me.

But the flesh does not tremble. Only love
could set it alight, this hate seeks it out.
All the possessions, all the flesh and all the voices
in the world cannot equal the burning caress
of that body and those eyes. In the bitter ecstasy
that kills itself, this hate still finds
each day a glance, a broken word,
and grasps them, hungrily, like love. — Cesare Pavese

The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities. — Cesare Pavese

Generations do not age. Every youth of any period, any civilization, has the same possibilities as always. — Cesare Pavese