Cesare Pavese Quotes

A decision, an action, are infallible omens of what we shall do another time, not for any vague, mystic, astrological reason but because they result from an automatic reaction that will repeat itself.

The real affliction of old age is remorse.

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.

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

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

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.

Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.

If it is true that one gets used to suffering, how is it that as the years go one always suffers more?
No, they are not mad, those people who amuse themselves, enjoy life, travel, make love, fight—they are not mad. We should like to do the same ourselves.

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

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

The only reason why we are always thinking of our own ego is that we have to live with it more continuously than with anyone else's.

Love is desire for knowledge.

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.