Explore Quotes by Cesare Pavese

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

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

There is only one pleasure-that of being alive. All the rest is misery.

You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young.

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

Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.

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

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

When we read, we are not looking for new ideas, but to see our own thoughts given the seal of confirmation on the printed page. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves

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.

From someone who doesn't want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette

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

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.