Cesare Pavese Quotes - Page 5

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love - any love - reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.

Whatever people may say, the fastidious formal manner of the upper classes is preferable to the slovenly easygoing behaviour of the common middle class. In moments of crisis, the former know how to act, the latter become uncouth brutes.

You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young.

There is something indecent in words .

In general, the man who is readily disposed to sacrifice himself is one who does not know how else to give meaning to his life. The profession of enthusiasm is the most sickening of all insincerities.

I've discovered nothing. but do you remember how much we talked when we were boys? We talked just for the fun of it. We knew very well it was only talk, but still we enjoyed it.

Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast.

If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.

Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.

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.

But here's the worst part: the trick to life lies in hiding from those we hold most dear how much they mean to is; if not, we'd lose them.

Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there?

You don't remember days, you remember moments.

The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men's pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends

The face of the night will be an old wound that reopens each evening, impassive and living. The distant silence will ache like a soul, mute, in the dark. We'll speak to the night as it's whispering softly.

There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.

To choose a hardship for ourselves is our only defense against that hardship. This is what is meant by accepting suffering. Those who, by their very nature, can suffer completely, utterly, have an advantage. That is how we can disarm the power of suffering, make it our own creation, our own choice; submit to it. A justification for suicide.

The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.

It is not that things happen to each of us according to his fate, but that he interprets what has happened, if he has power to do so, according to his sense of his own destiny .

For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.