Cesare PaveseThinkers

Art is a problem of balance between realism's wealth of experience and symbolism's depth of feeling.

Avoidance is not a way for us to free ourselves from something. We can do so only by living though it.

Childhood is experienced in retrospect and thus it appears slow because every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next.

Childhood is not necessarily a world of imagination, rather, 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'.

A Corpse is what's left after waking too often.

Death is repose, but the thought of death disturbs all repose.

Deception is a kind of mourning for the humiliation at not having deserved the other's trust.

Destiny is the sense of ourselves against which we interpret what has happened to us.

Fate is distinguished from destiny in that it is not that things happen to us according to our fate, but that we interpret what has happened to our sense of our own destiny.

Imagination is immensely poorer than reality.

Imagination is, in children, such that 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'.

Kissing is derived from 'kiss feeding' whereby mothers fed their infants by passing chewed food to their babies' mouths.