Cesare Pavese (1908 – 1950)
Italian poet, novelist, literary critic and translator.
Things which cost nothing are those which cost the most. Why? Because they cost us the effort of understanding that they are free.
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.
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.
When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.
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?
I thought of how many places there are in the world that belong in this way to someone, who has it in his blood beyond anyone else's understanding.
In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.
When we read, we are not looking for new ideas, but to see our own thoughts given the seal of confirmation on the printed page. 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.
At a certain point the two cigars fell at our feet in the snow and then we heard them whispering up there and moving about and then came a sigh louder than the others. When we looked up we could see nothing but the withered vine leaves and thousands of stars in the frosty sky. Nuto said "The blackguards" through his clenched teeth.
We do not free ourselves from something by avoiding it, but only by living though it.
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.
Things are revealed through the memories we have of them. Remembering a thing means seeing it—only then—for the first time.
Consider this point carefully: nowadays, suicide is just a way of disappearing. It is carried out timidly, quietly, and falls flat. It is no longer an action, only a submission.
The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one's own loneliness, how to communicate with others.
Don't mix wine and women, Doro.
That you need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. Your own village means that you're not alone, that you know there's something of you in the people and the plants and the soil, that even when you are not there it waits to welcome you.
What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.