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.
Cesare PaveseRead
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?
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that adult life often suppresses imagination, which re-emerges during moments of reflection.
Cesare Pavese's quote reflects on the innate creativity and imagination present in childhood that often gets lost as individuals grow older. He posits that while we may perceive childhood as a purely imaginative time, it is actually the childlike spirit within us that resuscitates creativity in rare moments of introspection, inviting us to question whether we truly acknowledged our imaginative selves as children.
Themes
ImaginationChildhoodCreativityReflectionLife
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about nurturing creativity in education, one might quote Pavese to emphasize the importance of imagination in learning.
More from Cesare Pavese
All quotes →Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.
Cesare PaveseRead
Dawn's faint breath breathes with your mouth at the ends of empty streets. Gray light your eyes, sweet drops of dawn on dark hills. Your steps and breath like the wind of dawn smother houses. The city shudders, Stones exhale— you are life, an awakening. Star lost in the light of dawn, trill of the breeze, warmth, breath— the night is done. You are light and morning.
Cesare PaveseRead
There is mercy for everyone, except those who are bored with life.
Cesare PaveseRead
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.
Cesare PaveseRead
The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.
Cesare PaveseRead
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