Cesare Pavese Quotes

There is only what is and that's it. What should be is a dirty lie.

I've reached the point where I hardly care whether I live or die. The world will keep on turning without me, and I can't do anything to change events anyway.

It was over now, and the meaningless world was tolerable and need not be explained. And never would it be, and how foolish I had ever been to think so.

I was already headed for Hell, I might as well enjoy the ride.

Good God, what does it matter? If life is a tragedy, or a farce, or a disaster, or anything else, what do I care! Let life be what it likes. Give me a drink, that's what I want just now.

We don't have to convince people how screwed they are.

When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.

To hope for nothing, to expect nothing, to demand nothing. This is analytical despair.

Ignore reality, there's nothing you can do about it.

Let whatever is going to happen to me happen. I'm expecting the worst for myself and I'm resigned to it.

There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.

'Weary Willie' is very real to me. He is a man who has given up. The boat has gone and left him. The cards are stacked against him. He's content to make out with what he's got. He knows he'll go no further.

Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.

I do get cynical, but what can you do? It doesn't make any difference.

The coming of ultimate failure we saw clearly enough, but the future beyond was a blank. The subject was naturally not a pleasant one, and by common consent it was always avoided in conversation, until at last we learned to avoid it in thought as well. We waited gloomily for the end, but did not care particularly to speculate upon the question when and how the end was to come.

An intimate core of my being recognizes that there is nothing in me that can go on: there is no spark; there is no infestation of vaporous miasma that has the capacity to continue, and there is nothing in me that wishes to continue. This moment is, for me, all that there is, and I'm willing to accept it. I'm a worm; I have no soul.

When the calamity we feared is already arrived, or when the expectation of it is so certain as to shut out hope, there seems to be a principle within us by which we look with misanthropic composure on the state to which we are reduced, and the heart sullenly contracts and accommodates itself to what it most abhorred.

As a Scandinavian, I like hopelessness and the weird austerity in the hopelessness of things.

The past is the past: what can you do about it?

I just tell you and though I dont sound like it I've got plenty of sense, there aint any answer, there aint going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, that's the answer.

In life, in true life, there can be nothing better than what is. Wanting something different than what is, is blasphemy.

When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.

If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky i felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, i felt what would be would be.

Insect politics, indifferent universe. Bang your head against the wall, but apathy is worse.

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