Cesare Pavese (1908 – 1950)
Italian poet, novelist, literary critic and translator.
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.
You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering.
Great lovers will always be unhappy, because, for them, love is of supreme importance. Consequently they demand of their beloved the same intensity of thought as they have for her, otherwise they feel betrayed.
Love is desire for knowledge.
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.
The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies. The fearful thing about it is that, not knowing what truth may be, we can still recognize lies.
What world lies beyond that stormy sea I do not know, but every ocean has a distant shore, and I shall reach it.
This much is certain: you can have anything in life except a wife to call you "her man." And till now all your life was based on that hope.
Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.
There is a reason why I came back to this place—came back here instead of to Canelli, Barbaresco or Alba. It is almost certain that I was not born here; where I was born I don't know. There is not a house or a bit of ground or a handful of dust hereabouts of which I can say: "This was me before I was born."
Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.
Maybe it's better like this, better that everything should go up in a blaze of dry grass and that people should begin again.
The problem is not the harshness of Fate, for anything we want strongly enough we get. The trouble is rather that when we have it we grow sick of it, and then we should never blame Fate, only our own desire.
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.
All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority, otherwise called ambition.
It is stupid to grieve for the loss of a girl friend: you might never have met her, so you can do without her.
Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.
We were at the age when a friend's conversation seems like oneself talking, when one shares a life in common the way I still think, bachelor though I am, some married couples are able to live.
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.
When a woman marries she belongs to another man; and when she belongs to another man there is nothing more you can say to her.