Cesare Pavese Quotes

What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.

Are you or aren't you convinced that weakness is a man's condition? How can you raise yourself if you haven't fallen first?

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.

What doesn't slumber under the shells of us all? One just needs courage to uncover it and be oneself. Or at least to discuss it. There isn't enough discussion in the world.

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

This much is certain: you can have anything in life except a wife to call you "her man." And till now all your life was based on that hope.

The most banal thing, discovered in ourselves, becomes intensely interesting. It is no longer an abstract banality, but an amazing co-ordination between reality and our own individuality.

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

Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.

Death is repose, but the thought of death disturbs all repose.

We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest.

All our "most sacred affections" are merely prosaic habit.

The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one's own loneliness, how to communicate with others.

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.

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