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.

Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.

Dawn's faint breath breathes with your mouth at the ends of empty streets. Gray light your eyes, sweet drops of dawn on dark hills. Your steps and breath like the wind of dawn smother houses. The city shudders, Stones exhale— you are life, an awakening. Star lost in the light of dawn, trill of the breeze, warmth, breath— the night is done. You are light and morning.

There is mercy for everyone, except those who are bored with life.

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.

The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.

Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends

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.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

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.

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

There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.

Great lovers will always be unhappy, because, for them, love is of supreme importance. Consequently they demand of their beloved the same intensity of thought as they have for her, otherwise they feel betrayed.

Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.

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

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?

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.

The only joy in the world is to begin.

The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.