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.
The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning, always, every moment. When this sensation is lacking—as when one is in prison, or ill, or stupid, or when living has become a habit—one might as well be dead.
What's got into your head? That I'm returning to my origins? The important things I have in my blood and nobody is going to take them away. I'm here to drink a bottle of my wine and sing a little–with anybody.
All our "most sacred affections" are merely prosaic habit.
It wasn't a country where a man could settle down and rest his head and say to the others, "Here I am for good or ill. For good or ill let me leave in peace." This was what was frightening.
Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.
The courage to stand alone as if others didn't exist and think only of what you're doing. Not to get scared if people ignore you. You have to wait for years, have to die. Then after you're dead, if you're lucky, you become somebody.
I don't believe it can end. Now that I've seen what war is, what civil war is, I know that everybody, if one day it should end, ought to ask himself: "And what shall we make of the fallen? Why are they dead?" I wouldn't know what to say. Not now, at any rate. Nor does it seem to me that the others know. Perhaps only dead know, and only for them is the war really over.