Cesare Pavese (1908–50) was an Italian poet, novelist, critic, and translator. Possibly the most famous Italian novelist of the 20th century, his work blends deliberations of poetic and epic representation, the theme of solitude, and the concept of myth.
Born in the Piedmont village of Santo Stefano Belbo, Pavese was brought up in Turin, where he worked for Einaudi, the publishing house. He published one volume of verse, a novel, and a shorter book of fiction. He made a number of essential translations that introduced many modern American and British writers to Italy—Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Sinclair Lewis, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and William Faulkner. Among his various translations, that of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1932) is regarded as a classic.
A leader of the Italian post-war neorealist school, Pavese was politically cynical and ultimately committed suicide. His poetry is light, and his most exceptional work is in novels like La casa in collina (1949; The House on the Hill, 1961) and La luna e i falò (1950; The Moon and the Bonfire, 1952,) which articulate precisely and categorically his detestation of war and fascism.
Collections of Pavese’s work include Racconti (1960; told in Confidence and Other Stories, 1971,) Poesie edite e inedite (1962,) and Lettere (1966.) A poetry collection in English, A Mania for Solitude, was published in 1969.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Cesare Pavese
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
Topics: Loneliness
Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in the world.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Beginnings, Wealth, Luxury
Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Life and Living
To choose a hardship for ourselves is our only defense against that hardship. This is what is meant by accepting suffering. Those who, by their very nature, can suffer completely, utterly, have an advantage. That is how we can disarm the power of suffering, make it our own creation, our own choice; submit to it. A justification for suicide.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Suffering
Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: “You can’t deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.”
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Books, Literature
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 Pavese
Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Pain, Enjoyment, One liners
We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Reason, Thought, The Present, One liners, Memories, Memory
Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else’s body.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Hatred, Hate
Will power is only the tensile strength of one’s own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Freedom
It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Imagination
At great periods you have always felt, deep within you, the temptation to commit suicide. You gave yourself to it, breached your own defenses. You were a child. The idea of suicide was a protest against life; by dying, you would escape this longing for death.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Suicide
If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be!
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Sin
This war burns our houses. It sows dead executed in open squares and roads. It chases us like hares from refuge to refuge. It will end up by forcing us to fight, to wring out an active approval. And the day will come when nobody will be outside the war, neither cowards, nor the sad, nor the lonely…
But I saw the unknown dead, dead members of the Italian Social Republic. If a stranger, an enemy becomes such a thing when he dies, if we stop dead fearing to step over him, it means that even the defeated enemy is someone who after spilling blood must be pacified. This blood must be given a voice and those who spilled it must be justified. It is humiliating to look at certain dead. They are not others
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: War
We don’t remember days; we remember moments.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: One liners, Memories, Memory
The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Depression
No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Suicide
All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Ambition, Sin
Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next.
—Cesare Pavese
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 Pavese
Topics: Reality
Love is the cheapest of religions.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Love
No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Cleverness, Love
Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Behavior, Manners
The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Acceptance, Realization, Awareness, Being Ourselves
The only joy in the world is to begin.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Beginnings, Secrets of Success
Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time—is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next.
—Cesare Pavese
Topics: Suffering
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