Cesare Pavese (1908 – 1950)
Italian poet, novelist, literary critic and translator.
We obtain things when we no longer want them.
Because, to despise money, one must have plenty of it.
Not believing in anything is also a religion.
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.
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.
If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be!
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.