Cesare Pavese

We never remember days, only moments.

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

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.

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.

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.

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

The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.

Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi. (Death will come and it will have your eyes.)