Cesare Pavese Quotes

I stagnated in prison a long time, and I have wasted most of my life.

There's not even room enough to be anywhere/It's not dark yet, but it's getting there.../I was born here and I'll die here against my will/I know it looks like I'm moving, but I'm standing still.

Nothing comes at all -- never anything. And I cannot accustom myself to that. It is this monotony, this absolute fixity in life, that is the hardest thing for me to endure. I should like to go away from here. Go away? But where and how? I do not know, and I stay.

The iron bolt...mysteriously fastens the door of hope and holds our spirits in a gloomy prison.

In my mind I'm a blind man doin' time.

When you're in prison, and we're left to our own devices, you're stripped of everything, and you really get to see who these people are, the good and the bad.

The day-to-day discomforts of prison life, combined with the big-picture realities of mass incarceration, do not add up to a party.

Estragon: Nothing to be done.

The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge.

In durance vile 1here must I wake and weep, And all my frowsy couch in sorrow steep.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

According to Beckett's or Kafka's law, there is immobility beyond movement: beyond standing up, there is sitting down, and beyond sitting down, lying down, beyond which one finally dissipates.

Sometimes it seems to stand still. Like you’re in a bag and you can’t get out and somebody’s always telling you that it will get better with time and time just seems to stand still and laugh at you and your pain.

All right, then, I thought: here I am in the bottom of a well.

Well, birthdays are merely symbolic of how another year has gone by and how little we've grown. No matter how desperate we are that someday a better self will emerge, with each flicker of the candles on the cake, we know it's not to be, that for the rest of our sad, wretched pathetic lives, this is who we are to the bitter end. Inevitably, irrevocably; happy birthday? No such thing.

We are turning our prisons into living tombs, inhabited by doomed men living in everlasting blank despair.

You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes - the wall, the wall!

Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or prison.

He had wanted so hard to Escape, to find the stars. And all he had found was a new prison.

How can one not succumb and allow one's courage to fail when everything is shut tight, when all meaningful things are walled up, and when you constantly knock against bricks, as against the walls of a prison?

The most painful thing in life is to wake up from a dream and find no way out. Dreamers are fortunate people. If no way out can be seen, the important thing is not to awaken the sleepers.

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one willl only in time come to hate. In this there is also a residue of belief that during the move the master will chance to come along the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: "This man is not to be locked up again, He is to come with me.

Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest - thought, action - is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go.

I'm sitting in a cage with my eye upon the clock.