Cesare Pavese Quotes

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

I only see clearly what I remember.

To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery.

She said I bet you dont remember me And I said only every other memory.

Memory is a strange Bell—Jubilee, and Knell.

Vision sometimes comes in a memory.

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.

Back on its golden hinges The gate of Memory swings, And my heart goes into the garden And walks with the olden things.

Looking back across the years, so many pictures flash on the screen of my memory that just as I begin to see one clearly, another slides in, blotting out the first, itself to be pushed aside by the next and the next and the next.

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.

Memory is not wisdom; idiots can by rote repeat volumes. Yet what is wisdom without memory?

Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

Time is the father of truth, its mother is our mind.

The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.

Swift defined observation to be an old man's memory.

In memory, you can access something from the past, anything that you've experienced that you remember - it's there. Now, you might have a memento of it in a photograph or in a film or a building or some clothes that you wore. There might be something that connects you to this memory. But all of us are just all caught in this time, whatever that is.

The past is a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door.

Insight is not a matter of memory, of knowledge and time, which are all thought.

The entire world is a collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her.

The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting.

Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.

I saw more than I can tell / And I understood more than I saw.

In opening them, he discovered that he had eyes.

He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later.