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Ambition
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All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority, otherwise called ambition.
-Cesare Pavese
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Books
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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.
-Cesare Pavese
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Depression
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The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.
-Cesare Pavese
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Freedom
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Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.
-Cesare Pavese
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Hate
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Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else's body.
-Cesare Pavese
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Imagination
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It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?
-Cesare Pavese
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Infatuation
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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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Life
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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
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Loneliness
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A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man --the one he used to be.
-Cesare Pavese
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Love
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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.
-Cesare Pavese
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Love is the cheapest of religions.
-Cesare Pavese
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Manners
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Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference.
-Cesare Pavese
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Memory
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We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
-Cesare Pavese
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We don't remember days; we remember moments.
-Cesare Pavese
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Pain
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Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.
-Cesare Pavese
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Reality
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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.
-Cesare Pavese
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Sin
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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!
-Cesare Pavese
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Suffering
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Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time -- is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next.
-Cesare Pavese
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Suicide
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No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.
-Cesare Pavese
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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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War
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This war burns our houses. It sows dead executed in open squares and roads. It chases us like hares from refuge to refuge. It will end up by forcing us to fight, to wring out an active approval. And the day will come when nobody will be outside the war, neither cowards, nor the sad, nor the lonely...
But I saw the unknown dead, dead members of the Italian Social Republic. If a stranger, an enemy becomes such a thing when he dies, if we stop dead fearing to step over him, it means that even the defeated enemy is someone who after spilling blood must be pacified. This blood must be given a voice and those who spilled it must be justified. It is humiliating to look at certain dead. They are not others
-Cesare Pavese, House on the Hill
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Wealth
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Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in the world.
-Cesare Pavese
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Books by and about Cesare Pavese