Cesare Pavese

"A dialogue between lovers is never made up of words alone."

"The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe."

"To have another language is to possess a second soul."

"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."

"Happiness is when you feel how hard work turns into joy."

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, we feel them vibrate in response to every act and word of ours."

"The fascism of tomorrow will be called the name of humanism."

"A writer is first of all a man who is passionately in love with language."

"The truth is that life is delicious, horrible, charming, frightful, sweet, bitter, and that is everything."

"All the writer has to do to elevate his subject is his absolute integrity."

"Perfect love is rare indeed—for it requires an I and thou."

"Travelling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends."

"Death is a debt we all have to pay."

"Violence and arms have always been the ultima ratio in human affairs."

"The art of living is the art of believing half of what we hear."

"Youth is a disease from which we all recover."

"If there is a sin against life, it is perhaps to insist on creating painlessly."

"Discipline is remembering what you want."

"The modern man is suffering from a kind of poverty of the spirit which is the worst of all poverties."

"One's fantasy becomes a fantasy when one is present in it."

"We work in order to eat, and we eat in order to work."

"There's no point in belonging to the oppressed if you oppress yourself."

"A writer must have the courage of his convictions and never bow to fashion or pressure."

"The sadness of the world is also beauty."

"Knowledge is not a problem to be solved but a passion to be cultivated."

"History is the nightmare from which we are trying to awake."

"The deepest spiritual crises are always about sex and death."

"We must want what is and transform it into what should be."

"Mountains are the cathedrals where I take my religion."

"Friendships are precious gifts that require constant tending."