Quote

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

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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
Always
Prison
Physical
Rest
Action
Reality
Grips
Past
Pastime
Thought
Counts
Come
Mental

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A dream is a creation of the intelligence, the creator being present but not knowing how it will end.
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The search for a new personality is futile what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities.
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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.
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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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Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
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Love is desire for knowledge.
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You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young.
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The act the act must not be a revenge. It must be a calm, weary renunciation, a closing of accounts, a private, rhythmic deed. The last remark.
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We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word.
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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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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.
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To avenge a wrong done to you, is to rob yourself of the comfort of crying out against the injustice of it.
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How can you have confidence in a woman who will not risk entrusting her whole life to you, day and night?
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Woman gives herself as a prize to the weak and as a prop to the strong and no man ever has what he should.
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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.
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We obtain things when we no longer want them.
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We do not free ourselves from something by avoiding it, but only by living though it.
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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.
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You don't remember days, you remember moments.
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Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.
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