Frases de Cesare Pavese

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“Serás amado el día en que puedas mostrar tu debilidad sin que el otro se sirva de esta para afirmar su fuerza”

“A veces una mujer encuentra los restos de un barco hecho pedazos y decide hacer con ellos un hombre sano. En ocasiones lo consigue. Otras veces una mujer encuentra un hombre sano y decide hacerlo pedazos. Siempre lo consigue.”

“Los suicidas son homicidas tímidos.”

“Uno no se mata por el amor de una mujer. Uno se mata porque un amor, cualquier amor, nos revela nuestra desnudez, nuestra miseria, nuestro desamparo, la nada.”

“Vendrá la muerte y tendrá tus ojos”

“Vendrá la muerte y tendrá tus ojos
esta muerte que nos acompaña
de la mañana a la noche, insomne,
sorda, como un viejo remordimiento
o un vicio absurdo. Tus ojos
serán una palabra vana,
un grito acallado, un silencio.
Así los ves cada mañana
cuando te inclinas sola ante el espejo.
Oh querida esperanza
también nosotros aquel día
sabremos que eres la vida y eres la nada!

La muerte tiene una mirada para todos.
Vendrá la muerte y tendrá tus ojos.
será como abandonar un vicio,
como ver que emerge de nuevo
un rostro muerto en el espejo,
como escuchar un labio cerrado.
Descenderemos, mudos, al abismo.”

“He viajado lo suficiente por el mundo como para saber que todas las carnes son buenas y valen lo mismo, y eso es precisamente lo que estraga y por lo que uno busca echar raíces, hacerse tierra y pueblo, para que su carne tenga sentido y dure más que un triste cambio de estación.”

“La sorpresa es el móvil de cada descubrimiento.”

“Amor es deseo de conocimiento.”

“¿Te asombras de que otros pasen junto a ti y no sepan, cuando tú pasas junto a tantos y no sabes, no te interesa, cuál es su pena, su cáncer secreto?”

“Una verdadera revelación, me parece a mí, sólo emergerá de la concentración obstinada sobre un problema solitario. No estoy aliado con inventores o aventureros, tampoco con viajeros en destinos exóticos. La manera más segura - y también la más rápida- de despertar el sentido de la maravilla en nosotros mismos es mirar resueltamente, sin detenernos, un simple objeto. De pronto, milagrosamente, se revelará a sí mismo como algo que nunca antes habíamos visto.”

“la literatura es la defensa frente a las ofensas de la vida”

“I started explaining to her that nothing is vulgar in itself but that talking and thinking make it so.”

“What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.”

“All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority, otherwise called ambition.”

“The act—the act—must not be a revenge. It must be a calm, weary renunciation, a closing of accounts, a private, rhythmic deed. The last remark.”

“You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young.”

“Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.”

“The real affliction of old age is remorse.”

“Love has the faculty of making two lovers seem naked, not in each other's sight, but in their own.”

“Don't mix wine and women, Doro.”

“I realised that Nuto was quite right when he said that to live in a hovel or in a palace was one and the same thing, that blood is the same colour everywhere, and that everybody wants to be rich and in love and make their fortune.”

“Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.”

“Men who have a tempestuous inner life and do not seek to give vent to it by talking or writing are simply men who have no tempestuous inner life.
Give company to a lonely man and he will talk more than anyone.”

“The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one's own loneliness, how to communicate with others.”

“The whole plain was like a battlefield—or a farmyard. There was a reddish light and I jumped down, cramped and stiff with cold; a sliver of moon was piercing the low clouds and it looked like a gash from a knife and bathed the plain in a blood-red light. I stayed looking at it for a while. It terrified me.”

“Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there?”

“Nuto, who had never really gone away, still wanted to understand the world and change it, and upset the cycle of the seasons. Or perhaps he didn't, and still believed only in the moon. But I, who didn't believe in the moon, knew that when all was said and done only the seasons matter and they are in your bones and they nurtured you when you were a boy.”

“But she didn't laugh. "When you have children," she said, staring at her glass, "you accept life. Do you accept life?"”

“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.”

“There is a reason why I came back to this place—came back here instead of to Canelli, Barbaresco or Alba. It is almost certain that I was not born here; where I was born I don't know. There is not a house or a bit of ground or a handful of dust hereabouts of which I can say: "This was me before I was born."”

“Are you or aren't you convinced that weakness is a man's condition? How can you raise yourself if you haven't fallen first?”

“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.”

“We obtain things when we no longer want them.”

“But all years are stupid. It's only when they're over that they become interesting.”

“In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.”

“It is stupid to grieve for the loss of a girl friend: you might never have met her, so you can do without her.”

“Not believing in anything is also a religion.”

“Certainly, to have a woman who waits at home for you, who will sleep with you, gives a warm feeling like having something you must say; it makes you glow, keeps you company, helps you to live.”

“A consoling thought: what matters is not what we do, but the spirit in which we do it. Others suffer too; so much so that there is nothing in the world but suffering; the problem is simply to keep a clear conscience.”

“There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.”