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
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
The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped. – Cesare Pavese
No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first. – Cesare Pavese
Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world. – Cesare Pavese
One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one’s trouble does not make it any better. – Cesare Pavese
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
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
If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be. – Cesare Pavese
Will power is only the tensile strength of one’s own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce. – Cesare Pavese
If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears. – Cesare Pavese
