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For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

Cesare Pavese

From someone who doesn’t want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette.
CESARE PAVESE

Acceptance Destiny Share Yourself
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.
CESARE PAVESE

Effort Experience Future Past Skills Technique World Yourself
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

Addition Complication Live Mistake Right Work
We care so little of other people than even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God.
CESARE PAVESE

Care God Love People Religion
It’s pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone.
CESARE PAVESE

Alone Born Cry Death Point
It had to happen to you, to concentrate your whole life on one point, and then discover that you can do anything except live at that point.
CESARE PAVESE

Exception Life Live Point Yourself
Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.
CESARE PAVESE

Combination Happiness Writing Yourself
The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one’s own loneliness, how to communicate with others.
CESARE PAVESE

Break Communication Life Lonely Problem
Here’s the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.
CESARE PAVESE

Act Ambition Beyond Difficult Pass Suicide
Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.
CESARE PAVESE

Hands Mouth Ready Willing
We want Realism’s wealth of experience and Symbolism’s depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites.
CESARE PAVESE

Balance Deep Feeling Opposite Problem Reality Wealth
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.
CESARE PAVESE

Abandonment Captain Destiny Enough Hard Time Myself
Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.
CESARE PAVESE

Discussion Logic Philosophy Woman
It is not that things happen to each of us according to his fate, but that he interprets what has happened, if he has power to do so, according to his sense of his own destiny.
CESARE PAVESE

Action Destiny Fate Himself Reaction
We commit two wrongs when we fail to right a wrong.
CESARE PAVESE

Commitment Failure Wrong
One must look for one thing only, to find many.
CESARE PAVESE

Finding Oneself Search
Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one’s own pleasure is shared.
CESARE PAVESE

Happiness Love Poetry Remember Share Writing
You will hear words old and spent and useless like costumes left over from yesterday’s parties.
CESARE PAVESE

Costume Old Party Word Yourself
There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.
CESARE PAVESE

Day Feeling Forgiveness Himself Stupidity
The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.
CESARE PAVESE

Descend Escape Sound
I thought of how many places there are in the world that belong in this way to someone, who has it in his blood beyond anyone else’s understanding.
CESARE PAVESE

Blood Myself Place Thinking Understand World
Great lovers will always be unhappy, because, for them, love is of supreme importance. Consequently they demand of their beloved the same intensity of thought as they have for her, otherwise they feel betrayed.
CESARE PAVESE

Greatness Happiness Important Intensity Love Lover
A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.
CESARE PAVESE

Complete Man Success Transcendence Work
We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word.
CESARE PAVESE

Feeling Heart Ourselves Word
One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one’s trouble does not make it any better.
CESARE PAVESE

Better Children Oneself Stop Trouble
A decision, an action, are infallible omens of what we shall do another time, not for any vague, mystic, astrological reason but because they result from an automatic reaction that will repeat itself.
CESARE PAVESE

Action Decision Reaction Repeat Result Time
The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.
CESARE PAVESE

Art Believe Live Lying

For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

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For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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