Cesare Pavese (1908 – 1950)
Italian poet, novelist, literary critic and translator.
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.
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.
We want Realism's wealth of experience and Symbolism's depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites.
The thing most feared in secret always happens.
I write: oh Thou, have mercy. And then?
All it takes is a little courage.
The more the pain grows clear and definite, the more the instinct for life asserts itself and the thought of suicide recedes.
It seemed easy when I thought of it. Weak women have done it. It takes humility, not pride.
All this is sickening.
Not words. An act. I won't write any more.
Love is the cheapest of religions.
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.
Don't mix wine and women, Doro.
The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one's own loneliness, how to communicate with others.
What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.
What use is this valley to a family that comes from across the sea and knows nothing about the moon and the bonfires? You must have grown up there and have in in your bones, like wine and polenta, and then you know it without needing to speak about it and everything you have carried about inside you for so many years without knowing awakens now at the rattle of the chain on a cart, at the swish of an ox' tail, at the taste of a bowl of minestra, at the sound of a voice heard in the square at night.
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?
There is only one pleasure—that of being alive. All the rest is misery.
When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.
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.
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.
Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there?
Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.