Cesare Pavese
25 quotes
Biography
Cesare Pavese was an Italian novelist, poet, short story writer, translator, literary critic, and essayist. He is often referred to as one of the most influential Italian writers of his time.
"Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world."
"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."
"From someone who doesn't want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette"
"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."
"Many men on the point of an edifying death would be furious if they were suddenly restored to health."
"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."
"A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man - the one he used to be."
"The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies."
"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?"
"No woman marries for money they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first."
"Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce."
"He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity."
"Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce."
"Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: "You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal"
"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."
"The cadence of suffering has begun."
"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."
"The search for a new personality is futile what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities."
"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."
"The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten."
"Every luxury must be paid for and everything is a luxury starting with being in the world."
"The search for a new personality is futile what is fruitful is the human interest the old personality can take in new activities."
"We do not remember days we remember moments."
"No woman marries for money they are all clever enough before marrying a millionaire to fall in love with him first."
"The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped."