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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

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Cesare Pavese
Age: 41 †
Born: 1908
Born: September 9
Died: 1950
Died: August 27
Biographer
Journalist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Editor
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Vulnerability
Misery
Oneself
Kill
Woman
Nakedness
Doe
Infatuation
Love
Reveals
Nothingness

More quotes by Cesare Pavese

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What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.
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Many men on the point of an edifying death would be furious if they were suddenly restored to health.
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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.
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The only joy in the world is to begin.
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Men who have a tempestuous inner life and do not seek to give vent to it by talking or writing are simply men who have no tempestuous inner life. Give company to a lonely man and he will talk more than anyone.
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I was happy enough I knew that during the night the whole city might go up in flames and all its people be killed, but the ravines, houses, and footpaths would wake in the morning calm and unchanged.
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You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering .
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If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.
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The problem is not the harshness of Fate, for anything we want strongly enough we get. The trouble is rather that when we have it we grow sick of it, and then we should never blame Fate, only our own desire.
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Anchorites used to ill-treat themselves in the way they did, so that the common people would not begrudge them the beatitude they would enjoy in heaven.
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You don't remember days, you remember moments.
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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
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You wait for nothing if not for the word that will burst from the deep like a fruit among branches.
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You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young.
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Whatever people may say, the fastidious formal manner of the upper classes is preferable to the slovenly easygoing behaviour of the common middle class. In moments of crisis, the former know how to act, the latter become uncouth brutes.
Cesare Pavese
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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
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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. The profession of enthusiasm is the most sickening of all insincerities.
Cesare Pavese
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Narrating incredible things as though they were real old system narrating realities as though they were incredible the new.
Cesare Pavese
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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.
Cesare Pavese
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Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast.
Cesare Pavese