Cesare Pavese Quotes

The face of the night will be an old wound that reopens each evening, impassive and living. The distant silence will ache like a soul, mute, in the dark. We’ll speak to the night as it’s whispering softly.

The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men’s pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.

War makes men barbarous because, to take part in it, one must harden oneself against all regret, all appreciation of delicacy and sensitive values. One must live as if those values did not exist, and when the war is over one has lost the resilience to return to those values.

It’s pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone.

You wait for nothing if not for the word that will burst from the deep like a fruit among branches.

A consoling thought: what matters is not what we do, but the spirit in which we do it. Others suffer too; so much so that there is nothing in the world but suffering; the problem is simply to keep a clear conscience.

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

I am the captain of my destiny, I do not abandon the ship in hard times, But, I do have sense enough not to go down with the ship.

For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company.

I thought of how many places there are in the world that belong in this way to someone, who has it in his blood beyond anyone else’s understanding.

When a woman marries she belongs to another man; and when she belongs to another man there is nothing more you can say to her.