Cesare Pavese
Don't you know that what happens to you once always happens again? You always react in the same way to the same thing. It's no accident when you make a mess. Then you do it again. It's called destiny.Collection: Destiny
Nowadays, suicide is just a way of disappearing. It is carried out timidly, quietly, and falls flat. It is no longer an action, only a submission.Collection: Suicide
Certainly, to have a woman who waits at home for you, who will sleep with you, gives a warm feeling like having something you must say; it makes you glow, keeps you company, helps you to live.Collection: Home
It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to be no longer obsessed by it.Collection: Desire
Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.Collection: Women
A dream is a creation of the intelligence, the creator being present but not knowing how it will end.Collection: Dream
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?Collection: Love
I am the captain of my destiny, I do not abandon the ship in hard times, But, I do have sense enough not to go down with the ship.Collection: Hard Times
A love thought: I love you so much that I could wish I had been born your brother, or had brought you into the world myself.Collection: Brother
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.Collection: Sacrifice
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.Collection: Fun
Whatever people may say, the fastidious formal manner of the upper classes is preferable to the slovenly easygoing behaviour of the common middle class. In moments of crisis, the former know how to act, the latter become uncouth brutes.Collection: Class
I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company.Collection: Mirrors
Love is desire for knowledge.Collection: Love Is
We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word.Collection: Fun
You don't remember days, you remember moments.Collection: Remember
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.Collection: Blood
Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast.Collection: Smoking
Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.Collection: Suicide
Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there?Collection: Ivy
Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friendsCollection: Travel
But here's the worst part: the trick to life lies in hiding from those we hold most dear how much they mean to is; if not, we'd lose them.Collection: Lying
The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men's pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.Collection: Pain
The face of the night will be an old wound that reopens each evening, impassive and living. The distant silence will ache like a soul, mute, in the dark. We'll speak to the night as it's whispering softly.Collection: Dark
There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Suicide
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 .Collection: Fate
For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.Collection: History
The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.Collection: Grief
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.Collection: Lying
A consoling thought: what matters is not what we do, but the spirit in which we do it. Others suffer too; so much so that there is nothing in the world but suffering; the problem is simply to keep a clear conscience.Collection: What Matters
Things are revealed through the memories we have of them. Remembering a thing means seeing it only then for the first time.Collection: Memories
Because, to despise money, one must have plenty of it.Collection: Despise
You will hear words old and spent and useless like costumes left over from yesterday's parties.Collection: Party
The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.Collection: Time
What we desire is not to possess a woman, but to be the only one to possess her.Collection: Women
Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.Collection: Perfect
Don't mix wine and women.Collection: Wine
A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.Collection: Work
We care so little of other people than even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God.Collection: People
There is nothing fine about being a child: it is fine, when we are old, to look back to when we were children.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Decision
Not believing in anything is also a religion .Collection: Believe
The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities.Collection: Acceptance
The real affliction of old age is remorse.Collection: Real
To avenge a wrong done to you, is to rob yourself of the comfort of crying out against the injustice of it.Collection: Comfort
But all years are stupid. It's only when they're over that they become interesting.Collection: Stupid
You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young.Collection: Life
When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.Collection: Writing