Cesare Pavese on Time

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

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

"There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him."

"But all years are stupid. It's only when they're over that they become interesting."

"We do not remember days, we remember moments."

"The world, the future, is now within you as your past, as experience, skill in technique, and the rich, everlasting mystery is found to be childish you that, at the time, you made no effort to possess."

"For some time my friend Doro and I had agreed that I would be his guest. I was very fond of Doro, and when he married and went to Genoa to live, I was half sick over it. When I wrote to refuse his invitation to the wedding, I got a dry and rather haughty note replying that if his money wasn't good for establishing himself in a city that pleased his wife, he didn't know what it was good for. Then, one fine day as I was passing through Genoa I stopped at his house and we made peace. I liked his wife very much, a tomboy type who graciously asked me to call her Clelia and left us alone as much as she should, and when she showed up again in the evening to go out with us, she had become a charming woman whose hand I would have kissed had I been anyone else but myself."