Cesare Pavese (1908 – 1950)
Italian poet, novelist, literary critic and translator.
Generations do not age. Every youth of any period, any civilization, has the same possibilities as always.
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.
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.
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?
All of them, all those idiots who force their brains and don't know when to stop.
Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.
No woman marries for money: they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him.
Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.
There is nothing fine about being a child: it is fine, when we are old, too look back to when we were children.
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).
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.
The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
I was happy enough; I knew that during the night the whole city might go up in flames and all its people be killed, but the ravines, houses, and footpaths would wake in the morning calm and unchanged.
Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.
Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there?
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.
There is only one pleasure—that of being alive. All the rest is misery.
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?
Things which cost nothing are those which cost the most. Why? Because they cost us the effort of understanding that they are free.
When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.