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 PaveseRead
Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
Interpretation
Artists serve a vital and contemplative role in society, often reflecting and critiquing the values of their time.
In this quote, Cesare Pavese likens artists to monks, suggesting that they are dedicated to a higher calling that transcends the mundane concerns of the bourgeois, or middle-class, society in which they operate. This implies that artists, through their creations, engage deeply with the human experience and societal issues, often isolating themselves from mainstream culture to pursue a profound understanding and expression of existence.
In practice
This quote could be used in an art class to discuss the role of artists in society.
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.
I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them.
Perhaps when I have 10 films behind me, I will have something worth saying.
Prose is admittedly an art rooted in social intercourse, and a fiction writer is faster to find a common denominator with his cell mates than a poet is.
Writing, for me, was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life.
The trick is not to become somebody else. You become somebody else when you're in front of a camera or when you're on stage. There are some people who carry it all the time. That, to me, is not acting.
A writer's work is the product of laziness.
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