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
Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Writing poetry and making love both involve personal expression and vulnerability, and it's uncertain if the pleasure is mutual.
This quote by Cesare Pavese highlights the intimate and subjective nature of both poetry and love. Just as one can pour their heart into a poem and wonder if it resonates with others, in love, one may question if their feelings and pleasures are reciprocated, underscoring the uncertainty and depth of emotional connections.
Themes
PoetryLoveExpressionPleasureEmotion
In practice
Example use cases
This quote would make a great addition to a poetry workshop to discuss the emotional risks involved in creative expression.
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
Similar quotes
Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.
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So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.
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In the 'Nude Descending a Staircase,' I wanted to create a static image of movement: movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn't descending an equally real staircase.
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The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.
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A picture is poem without words.
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We are part of each other and part of something bigger than our own egos. An artist should... bring into the world some vision. Dancers should ask, "What is their work in the service of?"
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