Quote

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.

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
Enough
Cities
Footpaths
Would
Knew
Unchanged
People
Morning
Houses
Happy
Flames
House
Killed
Night
Wake
Might
Calm
Whole
City

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There is something indecent in words .
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The only joy in the world is to begin.
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Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.
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Nowadays, suicide is just a way of disappearing. It is carried out timidly, quietly, and falls flat. It is no longer an action, only a submission.
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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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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.
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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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We can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts.
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Don't mix wine and women.
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People who don't know any better will always be in the dark because the power lies in the hands of men who take good care that ordinary folk don't understand, in the hands, that is, of the government, of the clerical party, of the capitalists.
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The man of action is not the headstrong fool who rushes into danger with no thought for himself, but the man who puts into practice the things he knows.
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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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There is only one pleasure-that of being alive. All the rest is misery.
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The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.
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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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No woman marries for money they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.
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It is stupid to grieve for the loss of a girl friend: you might never have met her, so you can do without her.
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Narrating incredible things as though they were real old system narrating realities as though they were incredible the new.
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Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.
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