Cesare Pavese Quotes - Page 6

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.

War makes men barbarous because, to take part in it, one must harden oneself against all regret, all appreciation of delicacy and sensitive values. One must live as if those values did not exist, and when the war is over one has lost the resilience to return to those values.

Generations do not age. Every youth of any period, any civilization, has the same possibilities as always.

Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next.

Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest - thought, action - is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go.

When a man mourns for someone who has played him false, it is not for love of her, but for his own humiliation at not having deserved her trust.

The world, the future, is now within you as your past, as experience, skill in technique, and the rich, everlasting mystery is found to be childish you that, at the time, you made no effort to possess.

Dawn's faint breath breathes with your mouth at the ends of empty streets. Gray light your eyes, sweet drops of dawn on dark hills. Your steps and breath like the wind of dawn smother houses. The city shudders, Stones exhale— you are life, an awakening. Star lost in the light of dawn, trill of the breeze, warmth, breath— the night is done. You are light and morning.

Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will.

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).

It had to happen to you, to concentrate your whole life on one point, and then discover that you can do anything except live at that point.

The act the act must not be a revenge. It must be a calm, weary renunciation, a closing of accounts, a private, rhythmic deed. The last remark.

You wait for nothing if not for the word that will burst from the deep like a fruit among branches.

How can you have confidence in a woman who will not risk entrusting her whole life to you, day and night?

The problems that agitate one generation are exstinguished for the next, not because they have been solved but because the general lack of interest sweeps them away.

In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.

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.

The problem is not the harshness of Fate, for anything we want strongly enough we get. The trouble is rather that when we have it we grow sick of it, and then we should never blame Fate, only our own desire.

Work alone isn't enough for me and mine; we know how to break our backs, but the great dream Of my fathers was to be good at doing nothing.

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.

When a woman marries she belongs to another man; and when she belongs to another man there is nothing more you can say to her.

Anchorites used to ill-treat themselves in the way they did, so that the common people would not begrudge them the beatitude they would enjoy in heaven.

A work settles nothing, just as the labor of a whole generation settles nothing. Sons, and the morrow, always start afresh.

Narrating incredible things as though they were real old system; narrating realities as though they were incredible the new.

Maybe it's better like this, better that everything should go up in a blaze of dry grass and that people should begin again.