Cesare Pavese

Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference.

— Cesare Pavese

Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.

— Cesare Pavese

Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else's body.

— 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

One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love -- any love -- reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.

— Cesare Pavese

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. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.

— Cesare Pavese

Literature is a defense 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

A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man --the one he used to be.

— Cesare Pavese

No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.

— Cesare Pavese

Love is the cheapest of religions.

— Cesare Pavese

We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

— Cesare Pavese

We don't remember days; we remember moments.

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in the world.

— Cesare Pavese

Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest --thought, action --is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go.

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

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.

— Cesare Pavese

Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time -- is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next.

— Cesare Pavese

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

— 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 defenses. You were a child. The idea of suicide was a protest against life; by dying, you would escape this longing for death.

— Cesare Pavese