Cesare Pavese Quotes

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.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

He told them it was only dogs that bark and go for strange dogs, and men set on a dog because it suits them to show that they are still masters, but if the dogs weren't dumb animals they would come to an agreements with each other and start barking at them.

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

Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.

Things are revealed through the memories we have of them. Remembering a thing means seeing it—only then—for the first time.

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.

There is only one pleasure—that of being alive. All the rest is misery.

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.

A consoling thought: what matters is not what we do, but the spirit in which we do it. Others suffer too; so much so that there is nothing in the world but suffering; the problem is simply to keep a clear conscience.

Things which cost nothing are those which cost the most. Why? Because they cost us the effort of understanding that they are free.

All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority, otherwise called ambition.

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

Since God could have created a freedom in which there could be no evil (i.e., a state when men were happy and free and certain not to sin), it follows that He wished evil to exist. But evil offends Him. A commonplace case of masochism.

But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever.