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
Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends
Interpretation
What this quote means
Travel can be challenging as it pushes you out of your comfort zone and relies on the kindness of others.
This quote by Cesare Pavese highlights the inherent difficulties of traveling. It suggests that travel can be brutal because it disrupts our sense of security and familiarity, forcing us to interact with strangers and adapt to new environments. This process can strip away our comfort zones, challenging us to grow and learn in ways we might not otherwise experience at home.
Themes
TravelComfortStrangersHomeAdaptation
In practice
Example use cases
This quote is perfect for a travel blog reflecting on the challenges and rewards of exploring new places.
More from Cesare Pavese
All quotes →Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.
Cesare PaveseRead
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.
Cesare PaveseRead
There is mercy for everyone, except those who are bored with life.
Cesare PaveseRead
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.
Cesare PaveseRead
The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.
Cesare PaveseRead
Similar quotes
Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home.
Paul BowlesRead
That is the magic of travel. You leave your home secure in your own knowledge and identity. But as you travel, the world in all it's richness intervenes. You meet people you could not invent; you see scenes you could not imagine. Your own world, which was so large as to consume your whole life, becomes smaller and smaller until it is only one tiny dot in time and space. You return a different person.
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Southeast Asia has a real grip on me. From the very first time I went there, it was a fulfillment of my childhood fantasies of the way travel should be.
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It's a very immersive and intense form of travel to walk around with an interpreter and stop random people on the street and ask them about their lives.
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Each time I go to a place I have not seen before I hope it will be as different as possible from the places I already know. I assume it is natural for a traveler to seek diversity, and that it is the human element that makes him most aware of difference. If people and their manner of living were alike everywhere, there would not be much point in moving from one place to another.
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Every time I step onto an airplane, I turn to the right and take a good, hard stare into the maw of the engine. I don't know what I'm looking for. I just do it.
Barbara KingsolverRead