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Writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.
CESARE PAVESE, This Business of Living, Nov. 6, 1937
It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to be no longer obsessed by it.
CESARE PAVESE, This Business of Living, Oct. 16, 1938
A corpse is what's left after waking too often.
CESARE PAVESE, "Imagination's End"
- Through the empty window
- the small boy watched the night on the hills,
- the cool, dark hills, astonished to find them
- massing together: a blurred and transparent stillness.
- Through leaves that fluttered in darkness rose hills
- where the things of the day--the slopes, the trees,
- the vineyards--stood clearly defined and dead,
- and life was another thing, made of wind, of sky,
- of leaves, and of nothing.
CESARE PAVESE, "The Night"
- You will hear words
- old and spent and useless
- like costumes left over
- from yesterday's parties.
CESARE PAVESE, "The Cats Will Know"
Nothing's more bitter that the dawn of a day in which nothing will happen.
CESARE PAVESE, "Morning Star over Calabria"
- 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.
CESARE PAVESE, "Sleeping Friend"
We do not remember days, we remember moments.
CESARE PAVESE, This Business of Living, Jul. 28, 1940
A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.
CESARE PAVESE, The Business of Living
Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.
CESARE PAVESE, This Business of Living, Sep. 15, 1946
In general, the man who is readily disposed to sacrifice himself is one who does not know how else to give meaning to his life.
CESARE PAVESE, This Business of Living
The only reason why we are always thinking of our own ego is that we have to live with it more continuously than with anyone else's.
CESARE PAVESE, This Business of Living
If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be!
CESARE PAVESE, This Business of Living
Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man.
CESARE PAVESE, This Business of Living
A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man -- the one he used to be.
CESARE PAVESE, The Burning Brand: Diaries
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