“You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young.”

— Cesare Pavese, The Beach (1941), Chapter 4

About Cesare Pavese

1908 – 1950

Italian poet and novelist, author of the diary "This Business of Living".

“Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.”

“Things are revealed through the memories we have of them. Remembering a thing means seeing it—only then—for the first time.”

“Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.”

“The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.”

“It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life.”

“There are but three events in a man's life: birth, life and death.”

“No man loves life like him that's growing old.”

“No one is so old that he does not think he could live another year.”

“Each of us lives only now, this brief instant.”