Cesare Pavese

For a long time we had talked of the hill as we might have talked of the sea or the woods. I used to go back there in the evening from the city when it grew dusk, and for me it was not just another place but a point of view, a way of life. For instance, I saw no difference between those hills and these ancient ones where I played as a child and where I live now: the same broken, straggling country, cultivated and wild, the same roads, farmhouses, and ravines. I used to climb up there in the evening as if I too were fleeing the nightly shock of the air-raid alarms.

He told me that it isn't what you do but how you do it that shows whether you are clever or not.

You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering.

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.

Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.

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.

Love has the faculty of making two lovers seem naked, not in each other's sight, but in their own.

But all years are stupid. It's only when they're over that they become interesting.

It is stupid to grieve for the loss of a girl friend: you might never have met her, so you can do without her.

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

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

If all this were true, how easy it would be to understand people.

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.

Because, to despise money, one must have plenty of it.