Cesare Pavese - Life Quotes

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If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.

Cesare Pavese
Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.

Cesare Pavese
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?

Cesare Pavese
The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

Cesare Pavese
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.

Cesare Pavese
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.'

Cesare Pavese
Life is not a search for experience, but for ourselves. Having discovered our own fundamental level we realize that it conforms to our own destiny and we find peace.

Cesare Pavese
Why does a man who is truly in love insist that this relationship must continue and be "lifelong"? Because life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic. Who would want to wake up halfway through an operation?

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.

Cesare Pavese
It had to happen to you, to concentrate your whole life on one point, and then discover that you can do anything except live at that point.

Cesare Pavese
Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next.

Cesare Pavese
How can you have confidence in a woman who will not risk entrusting her whole life to you, day and night?

Cesare Pavese
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.

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

Cesare Pavese
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.

Cesare Pavese