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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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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
Desire
Futility
Enjoyment
Actual
Obsessed
Test
Tests
Longer
Pleasure

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The world, the future, is now within you as your past, as experience, skill in technique, and the rich, everlasting mystery is found to be childish you that, at the time, you made no effort to possess.
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If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
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When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.
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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.
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Love is desire for knowledge.
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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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The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.
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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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You need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. A village means that you are not alone, knowing that in the people, the trees, the earth, there is something that belongs to you, waiting for you when you are not there.
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Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.
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Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.
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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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I am the captain of my destiny, I do not abandon the ship in hard times, But, I do have sense enough not to go down with the ship.
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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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Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.
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Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.
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Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.
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Don't mix wine and women.
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We do not free ourselves from something by avoiding it, but only by living though it.
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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.
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