Cesare Pavese

Dawn's faint breath breathes with your mouth at the ends of empty streets. Gray light your eyes, sweet drops of dawn on…

— Cesare Pavese

In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left…

— Cesare Pavese

Why does a man who is truly in love insist that this relationship must continue and be "lifelong"? Because life is pain…

— Cesare Pavese

I thought of how many places there are in the world that belong in this way to someone, who has it in…

— Cesare Pavese

Now that I've seen what war is, what civil war is, I know that everybody, if one day it should end, ought…

— Cesare Pavese

It had to happen to you, to concentrate your whole life on one point, and then discover that you can do anything…

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

But here's the worst part: the trick to life lies in hiding from those we hold most dear how much they mean…

— Cesare Pavese

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and…

— Cesare Pavese

“Meanwhile we arrived at our lane and the sight of the olive tree rubbed me the wrong way. I began to see…

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

All our "most sacred affections " are merely prosaic habit.

— Cesare Pavese

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

— Cesare Pavese

A consoling thought: what matters is not what we do, but the spirit in which we do it. Others suffer too; so…

— Cesare Pavese

One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love - any love - reveals us in our nakedness,…

— Cesare Pavese

How can you have confidence in a woman who will not risk entrusting her whole life to you, day and night?

— Cesare Pavese

The only reason why we are always thinking of our own ego is that we have to live with it more continuously…

— Cesare Pavese

The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.

— Cesare Pavese

What world lies beyond that stormy sea I do not know, but every ocean has a distant shore, and I shall reach…

— Cesare Pavese

If it is true that one gets used to suffering, how is it that as the years go one always suffers more?…

— Cesare Pavese

Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.

— Cesare Pavese

Many men on the point of an edifying death would be furious if they were suddenly restored to health.

— Cesare Pavese

We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest.

— Cesare Pavese

I was happy enough; I knew that during the night the whole city might go up in flames and all its people…

— Cesare Pavese

A work settles nothing, just as the labor of a whole generation settles nothing. Sons, and the morrow, always start afresh.

— Cesare Pavese