Cesare Pavese

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic. ”

If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be. ”

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped. ”

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. ”

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies. ”

Lessons are not given, they are taken. ”

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. ”

The only joy in the world is to begin. ”

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? ”