Cesare Pavese (1908 – 1950)
Italian poet, novelist, literary critic and translator.
We obtain things when we no longer want them.
The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
People who don't know any better will always be in the dark because the power lies in the hands of men who take good care that ordinary folk don't understand, in the hands, that is, of the government, of the clerical party, of the capitalists.
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 (blood and sex).
There is nothing fine about being a child: it is fine, when we are old, too look back to when we were children.
Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.
No woman marries for money: they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him.
Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.
All of them, all those idiots who force their brains and don't know when to stop.
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?
The whole plain was like a battlefield—or a farmyard. There was a reddish light and I jumped down, cramped and stiff with cold; a sliver of moon was piercing the low clouds and it looked like a gash from a knife and bathed the plain in a blood-red light. I stayed looking at it for a while. It terrified me.
Men who have a tempestuous inner life and do not seek to give vent to it by talking or writing are simply men who have no tempestuous inner life.
Give company to a lonely man and he will talk more than anyone.
Generations do not age. Every youth of any period, any civilization, has the same possibilities as always.
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.
Not believing in anything is also a religion.
Because, to despise money, one must have plenty of it.
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.
What we desire is not to possess a woman, but to be the only one to possess her.
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.
There's nothing that tastes of death more than the summer sun, the powerful light, exuberant nature. You sniff the air and listen to the woods and know that the plants and animals don't give a damn about you. Everything lives and consumes itself. Nature is death...