What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, lo...

What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.

Consider this point carefully: nowadays, suicide is just a way of disappearing. It is carried out timidly, quietly, and falls flat. It is no longer an action, only a submission.

But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever.

A love thought: I love you so much that I could wish I had been born your brother, or had brought you into the world myself.

Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company.

Love is the cheapest of religions.

In general, the man who is readily disposed to sacrifice himself is one who does not know how else to give meaning to his life.

There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.

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

There is only one pleasure—that of being alive. All the rest is misery.

The act—the act—must not be a revenge. It must be a calm, weary renunciation, a closing of accounts, a private, rhythmic deed. The last remark.

Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.

Cesare Pavese, from his journals