# The House on the Hill - Author: [Cesare Pavese](https://www.leafyquotes.com/cesare-pavese.md) - Quotes: 10 - Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/cesare-pavese/the-house-on-the-hill ## Quotes > There is something indecent in words. p. 126 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/cesare-pavese/the-house-on-the-hill/there-is-something.md) > I was happy enough; I knew that during the night the whole city might go up in flames and all its people be killed, but the ravines, houses, and footpaths would wake in the morning calm and unchanged. p. 63 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/cesare-pavese/the-house-on-the-hill/i-was-happy.md) > Even today I wonder why those Germans didn't wait for me at the villa and send someone to look for me in Turin. It is because of their failure that I am still free and up here. Why I should have been saved and not Gallo, or Tono, or Cate, I don't know. Perhaps because I'm supposed to suffer for others? Because I'm the most useless and don't deserve anything, not even punishment? Because I went into a church that time? The experience of danger creates more cowards every day. It makes one stupid. I have reached the point of being alive only by chance, when many better men than I are dead, I don't like it, it's not enough. At time, after having listened to the useless radio and looked through the windows at the empty vineyards, I think that living by accident is not living, and I wonder if have really escaped. p. 144 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/cesare-pavese/the-house-on-the-hill/even-today-i-wonder.md) > Not believing in anything is also a religion. p. 139 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/cesare-pavese/the-house-on-the-hill/not-believing-in-anything.md) > I don't believe it can end. Now that I've seen what war is, what civil war is, I know that everybody, if one day it should end, ought to ask himself: "And what shall we make of the fallen? Why are they dead?" I wouldn't know what to say. Not now, at any rate. Nor does it seem to me that the others know. Perhaps only dead know, and only for them is the war really over. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/cesare-pavese/the-house-on-the-hill/i-dont-believe.md) > For a long time we had talked of the hill as we might have talked of the sea or the woods. I used to go back there in the evening from the city when it grew dusk, and for me it was not just another place but a point of view, a way of life. For instance, I saw no difference between those hills and these ancient ones where I played as a child and where I live now: the same broken, straggling country, cultivated and wild, the same roads, farmhouses, and ravines. I used to climb up there in the evening as if I too were fleeing the nightly shock of the air-raid alarms. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/cesare-pavese/the-house-on-the-hill/for-a-long.md) > It's pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone... p. 105 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/cesare-pavese/the-house-on-the-hill/its-pointless-to-cry.md) > The courage to stand alone as if others didn't exist and think only of what you're doing. Not to get scared if people ignore you. You have to wait for years, have to die. Then after you're dead, if you're lucky, you become somebody. p. 105 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/cesare-pavese/the-house-on-the-hill/the-courage-to-stand.md) > That war in which I had been sheltering, convinced of having accepted it, of having made my own uncomfortable peace, grew more ferocious, bit deeper, reached into one's nerves and brain. p. 125 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/cesare-pavese/the-house-on-the-hill/that-war-in-which.md) > But I have seen the unknown dead, those little men of the Republic. It was they who woke me up. If a stranger, an enemy, becomes a thing like that when he dies, if one stops short and is afraid to walk over him, it means that even beaten our enemy is someone, that after having shed his blood, one must placate it, give this blood a voice, justify the man who shed it. Looking at certain dead is humiliating. One has the impression that the same fate that threw these bodies to the ground holds us nailed to the spot to see them, to fill our eyes with the sight. It's not fear, not our usual cowardice. One feels humiliated because one understands–touching it with one's eyes–that we might be in their place ourselves: there would be no difference, and if we live we owe it to this dirtied corpse. That is why every war is a civil war; every fallen man resembles one who remains and calls him to account. p. 176 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/cesare-pavese/the-house-on-the-hill/but-i-have.md)