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The world, the future, is now within you as your past, as experience, skill in technique, and the rich, everlasting mystery is found to be childish you that, at the time, you made no effort to possess.
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I thought of how many places there are in the world that belong in this way to someone, who has it in his blood beyond anyone else's understanding.
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In general, the man who is readily disposed to sacrifice himself is one who does not know how else to give meaning to his life. The profession of enthusiasm is the most sickening of all insincerities.
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Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
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Literature is a defence against the attacks of life. It says to life: 'You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.'
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There is only one pleasure-that of being alive. All the rest is misery.
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There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.
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Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.
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Woman gives herself as a prize to the weak and as a prop to the strong and no man ever has what he should.
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At great periods you have always felt, deep within you, the temptation to commit suicide. You gave yourself to it, breached your own defences. You were a child. The idea of suicide was a protest against life; by dying, you would escape this longing for death.
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Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer.
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Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.
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When they're dealing with the dead, priests are always right.
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To choose a hardship for ourselves is our only defense against that hardship. This is what is meant by accepting suffering. Those who, by their very nature, can suffer completely, utterly, have an advantage. That is how we can disarm the power of suffering, make it our own creation, our own choice; submit to it. A justification for suicide.
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One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one's trouble does not make it better.
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You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering.
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Pity was always a waste of one's time.
Existence is terrible, pity won't change that.
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The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning, always, every moment.
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When we read, we are not looking for new ideas, but to see our own thoughts given the seal of confirmation on the printed page. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves
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One cannot know one's own style and consciously employ it. One always uses a pre-existent style, unconsciously molding it into something fresh.
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The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
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Waiting is still an occupation. It's having nothing to wait for that is terrible.
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I have knocked about the world enough to know that one lot of flesh and blood is as good as another. But that's why you get tired and try to put down roots. To find somewhere where you belong so that you are worth more than the usual round of the seasons and last a bit longer.
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It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?
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Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference.
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Quote of the day
Now if the harvest is over, And the world cold, Give me the bonus of laughter, As I lose hold.
John Betjeman
Cesare Pavese
Born:
September 9, 1908
Died:
August 27, 1950
(aged 41)
Bio:
Cesare Pavese was an Italian poet, novelist, literary critic and translator. He is widely considered among the major authors of the 20th century in his home country.
Known for:
The Moon and the Bonfire (1950)
Hard Labor (1936)
The House on the Hill (1948)
Among Women Only
The Devil in the Hills (1948)
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