Cesare Pavese (1908 – 1950)
Italian poet, novelist, literary critic and translator.
But all years are stupid. It's only when they're over that they become interesting.
You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young.
If all this were true, how easy it would be to understand people.
Many men on the point of an edifying death would be furious if they were suddenly restored to health.
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.
Narrating incredible things as though they were real—old system; narrating realities as though they were incredible—the new.
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.
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.
But she didn't laugh. "When you have children," she said, staring at her glass, "you accept life. Do you accept life?"
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.
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.
Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.
I started explaining to her that nothing is vulgar in itself but that talking and thinking make it so.
We were very young. I don't think I ever slept that year, but I had a friend who slept even less than I did. Some mornings you could see him strolling up and down in front of the station when the first trains were arriving and leaving.
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.
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.
No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.
We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest.
To avenge a wrong done to you, is to rob yourself of the comfort of crying out against the injustice of it.
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.