Cesare Pavese

We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.

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

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.''

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.

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?

We don't remember days; we remember moments.

Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else's body.

Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.

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.

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.