Cesare Pavese quotes - page 5

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state. (Cesare Pavese)
But all years are stupid. It's only when they're over that they become interesting. View quote
Cesare Pavese
It is not that things happen to each of us according to his fate, but that he interprets what has happened, if he has power to do so, according to his sense of his own destiny . View quote
Cesare Pavese
There is nothing fine about being a child: it is fine, when we are old, to look back to when we were children. View quote
Cesare Pavese
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. View quote
Cesare Pavese
Not believing in anything is also a religion . View quote
Cesare Pavese
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. View quote
Cesare Pavese
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. View quote
Cesare Pavese
Maybe it's better like this, better that everything should go up in a blaze of dry grass and that people should begin again. View quote
Cesare Pavese
Narrating incredible things as though they were real old system; narrating realities as though they were incredible the new. View quote
Cesare Pavese
The courage to stand alone as if others didn't exist and think only of what you're doing. Not to get scared if people ignore you. You have to wait for years, have to die. Then after you're dead, if you're lucky, you become somebody. (Cesare Pavese)
If all this were true, how easy it would be to understand people. View quote
Cesare Pavese
I started explaining to her that nothing is vulgar in itself but that talking and thinking make it so. View quote
Cesare Pavese
I realised that Nuto was quite right when he said that to live in a hovel or in a palace was one and the same thing, that blood is the same colour everywhere, and that everybody wants to be rich and in love and make their fortune. View quote
Cesare Pavese
Even today I wonder why those Germans didn't wait for me at the villa and send someone to look for me in Turin. It is because of their failure that I am still free and up here. Why I should have been saved and not Gallo, or Tono, or Cate, I don't know. Perhaps because I'm supposed to suffer for others? Because I'm the most useless and don't deserve anything, not even punishment? Because I went into a church that time? The experience of danger creates more cowards every day. It makes one stupid. I have reached the point of being alive only by chance, when many better men than I are dead, I don't like it, it's not enough. At time, after having listened to the useless radio and looked through the windows at the empty vineyards, I think that living by accident is not living, and I wonder if have really escaped. View quote
Cesare Pavese
But I have seen the unknown dead, those little men of the Republic. It was they who woke me up. If a stranger, an enemy, becomes a thing like that when he dies, if one stops short and is afraid to walk over him, it means that even beaten our enemy is someone, that after having shed his blood, one must placate it, give this blood a voice, justify the man who shed it. Looking at certain dead is humiliating. One has the impression that the same fate that threw these bodies to the ground holds us nailed to the spot to see them, to fill our eyes with the sight. It's not fear, not our usual cowardice. One feels humiliated because one understands–touching it with one's eyes–that we might be in their place ourselves: there would be no difference, and if we live we owe it to this dirtied corpse. That is why every war is a civil war; every fallen man resembles one who remains and calls him to account. View quote
Cesare Pavese
The whole plain was like a battlefield-or a farmyard. There was a reddish light and I jumped down, cramped and stiff with cold; a sliver of moon was piercing the low clouds and it looked like a gash from a knife and bathed the plain in a blood-red light. I stayed looking at it for a while. It terrified me. View quote
Cesare Pavese
Nuto, who had never really gone away, still wanted to understand the world and change it, and upset the cycle of the seasons. Or perhaps he didn't, and still believed only in the moon. But I, who didn't believe in the moon, knew that when all was said and done only the seasons matter and they are in your bones and they nurtured you when you were a boy. View quote
Cesare Pavese
Things which cost nothing are those which cost the most. Why? Because they cost us the effort of understanding that they are free. View quote
Cesare Pavese
We were at the age when a friend's conversation seems like oneself talking, when one shares a life in common the way I still think, bachelor though I am, some married couples are able to live. View quote
Cesare Pavese
When one has made a mistake, one says. "Another time I shall know what to do," when one should say is: "I already know what I shall really do another time." (Cesare Pavese)
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. View quote
Cesare Pavese
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. View quote
Cesare Pavese
At a certain point the two cigars fell at our feet in the snow and then we heard them whispering up there and moving about and then came a sigh louder than the others. When we looked up we could see nothing but the withered vine leaves and thousands of stars in the frosty sky. Nuto said "The blackguards" through his clenched teeth. View quote
Cesare Pavese
The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning, always, every moment. When this sensation is lacking-as when one is in prison, or ill, or stupid, or when living has become a habit-one might as well be dead. View quote
Cesare Pavese