Italo Calvino Quotes

Collection of famous quotes and sayings about Italo Calvino.

Quotes About Italo Calvino

Enjoy collection of 100 Italo Calvino quotes. Download and share images of famous quotes about Italo Calvino. Righ click to see and save pictures of Italo Calvino quotes that you can use as your wallpaper for free.

New York is a fabled city, a fabulous city. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
I lowered my hands to try to save from disorder the arrangement of the tleaves and flowers; meanwhile, she was also dealing with the branches, leaning forward; and so it happened that at the very moment when one of my hands slipped in confusion between Madame Miyagi's kimono and her bare skin and found itself clasping a soft and warm breast, elongated in form, one of the lady's hands, from among the branches keiyaki [translator's note: in Europe called Caucasian elm], had reached my member and was holding it in a firm, frank grasp, drawing it from my garments as if she were performing the operation of stripping away leaves. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
The fact is that I find in the day's light, in this diffused, pale, almost shadowless luminosity, a darkness deeper than the night's. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
List of Artists Who Created Fantasy Worlds to Try and Cure Bouts of Sadness
1. Italo Calvino
2. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
3. Jim Henson and Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths
4. The creator of MySpace
5. Richard Brautigan
6. J.K. Rowling
7. The inventor of the children's toy Lite-Brite
8. Ann Sexton
9. David Foster Wallace
10. Gaugin and the Caribbean
11. Charles Schulz
12. Liam Rector ~ Shane Jones
Italo Calvino quotes by Shane Jones
Thus the city repeats its life, identical, shifting up and down on its empty chessboard. The inhabitants repeat the same scenes, with the acton changed; they repeat the same speeches with variously combined accents; they open alternate mouths in identical yawns. Alone, among all the cities of the empire, Eutropia remains always the same. Mercury, god of the fickle, to whom the city is sacred, worked this ambiguous miracle. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
What matters is not the enclosure of the work within a harmonious figure, but the centrifugal force produced by it
a plurality of language as a guarantee of a truth that is not merely partial. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather:that man is called 'I' and you know nothing else about him, just as this station is called only 'station' and beyond it there exists nothing except the unanswered signal of a telephone ringing in a dark room of a distant city. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
He knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a camel from whose pack hang wineskins and bags of candies fruit, date wine, tobacco leaves, and already he sees himself as the head of a long caravan taking him away from the desert of the sea, toward oases of fresh water in the palm trees' jagged shade, toward palaces of thick, whitewashed walls, tiled courts where girls are dancing barefoot, moving their arms, half-hidden by their veils, half-revealed. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Maybe you have to become a mother to get to the real sense of everything. Or a prostitute. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
We [ with Italo Calvino] had a great relationship. I don't think it's a coincidence that his only daughter's name is Giovanna. I loved his book dedications to me: "To Giovanna Cau, another book that won't be turned into a movie." ~ Giovanna Cau
Italo Calvino quotes by Giovanna Cau
A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind's phantasms. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Yet, even now, ever time (often) that I find that I don't understand something, then instinctively, I'm filled with the hope that perhaps this will be my moment again, perhaps once again I shall understand nothing, I shall grasp that other knowledge, found and lost in an instant. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Sections in the bookstore

- Books You Haven't Read
- Books You Needn't Read
- Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading
- Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written
- Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered
- Books You Mean to Read But There Are Others You Must Read First
- Books Too Expensive Now and You'll Wait 'Til They're Remaindered
- Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback
- Books You Can Borrow from Somebody
- Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too
- Books You've Been Planning to Read for Ages
- Books You've Been Hunting for Years Without Success
- Books Dealing with Something You're Working on at the Moment
- Books You Want to Own So They'll Be Handy Just in Case
- Books You Could Put Aside Maybe to Read This Summer
- Books You Need to Go with Other Books on Your Shelves
- Books That Fill You with Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified
- Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time to Re-read
- Books You've Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It's Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
And yet, in Raissa, at every moment there is a child in a window who laughs seeing a dog that has jumped on a shed to bite into a piece of polenta dropped by a stonemason who has shouted from the top of the scaffolding, "Darling, let me dip into it," to a young servant-maid who holds up a dish of ragout under the pergola, happy to serve it to the umbrella-maker who is celebrating a successful transaction, a white lace parasol bought to display at the races by a great lady in love with an officer who has smiled at her taking the last jump, happy man, and still happier his horse, flying over the obstacles, seeing a francolin flying in the sky, happy bird freed from its cage by a painter happy at having painted it feather by feather, speckled with red and yellow in the illumination of that page in the volume where the philosopher says: "Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young. - Italo Calvino ~ Kevin Brockmeier
Italo Calvino quotes by Kevin Brockmeier
I knew that signs also allow others to judge the one who makes them, and that in the course of a galactic year tastes and ideas have time to change, and the way of regarding the earlier ones depends on what comes afterwards; in short, I was afraid a sign that now might seem perfect to me, in two hundred or six hundred million years would make me look absurd. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Sometimes I try to concentrate on the story I would like to write, and I realize that what interests me is something else entirely, or, rather, not anything precise but everything that does not fit in what I ought to write. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
In the midst of a thick forest, there was a castle that gave shelter to all travelers overtaken by night on their journey: lords and ladies, royalty and their retinue, humble wayfarers. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Leave me like this. I have come full circle and I understand. The world must be read backward. All is clear. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
The people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping ... something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draw arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment, and other characters come on to the scene ... ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
From this arid sphere every discourse and every poem sets forth; and every journey
through forests, battles, treasures, banquets, bedchambers, brings us back here, to the center
of an empty horizon. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Though I leave the house as little as possible, I have the impression that someone is disturbing my papers. More than once I have discovered that some pages were missing from my manuscripts. A few days afterward I would find the pages in their place again. But often I no longer recognize my manuscripts, as if I had forgotten what I had written, or as if overnight I were so changed that no longer recognized myself in the self of yesterday. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
A publishing house is a fragile organism, dear sir," he says. "If at any point something goes askew, then the disorder spreads, chaos opens beneath our feet. Forgive me, won't you? When I think about it I have an attack of vertigo." And he covers his eyes, as if pursued by the sight of billions of pages, lines, words, whirling in a dust storm. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
I thought: "Perhaps Adelma is the city where you arrive dying and where each finds again the people he has known. This means I, too, am dead." And I also thought: "This means the beyond is not happy. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
I spend 12 hours a day reading on most days of the year. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
A quarter of America is a dramatic, tense, violent country, exploding with contradictions, full of brutal, physiological vitality, and that is the America that I have really loved and love. But a good half of it is a country of boredom, emptiness, monotony, brainless production, and brainless consumption, and this is the American inferno. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
As a matter of fact, we had already been warned against sliding down the marble banisters, not out of fear that we might break a leg or an arm, for that never worried our parents-which was, I think, why we never broke anything-but because they feared that since we were growing up and gaining weight, we might knock over the busts of ancestors placed by our father on the banisters at the turn of every flight of stairs. Cosimo had, in fact, once brought down a bishop, a great-great-great-grandfather, miter and all; lie was punished, and since then he had learned to brake just before reaching the turn of a flight and jump off within a hair's-breadth of running into a bust. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to concern himself with the world that repels him. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
I'm accustomed to thinking of literature as a search for knowledge; in order to move onto existential terrain I need to consider it in relation to anthropology, ethnology, and mythology. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
No, memory is true as long as you do not set it, as long as it is not enclosed in a form. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic. ITALO CALVINO ~ Salman Rushdie
Italo Calvino quotes by Salman Rushdie
One writes fables in periods of oppression. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Recurrent invasions racked the city of Theodora in the centuries of its history; no sooner was one enemy routed than another gained strength and threatened the survival of the inhabitants. When the sky was cleared of condors, they had to face the propagation of serpents; the spiders' extermination allowed the flies to multiply into a black swarm; the victory over the termites left the city at the mercy of the woodworms. One by one the species incompatible to the city had to succumb and were extinguished. By dint of ripping away scales and carapaces, tearing off elytra and feathers, the people gave Theodora the exclusive image of human city that still distinguishes it. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
When the olfactory alphabet, which made them so many words in a precious lexicon, is forgotten, perfumes will be left speechless, inarticulate, illegible. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
At this point we must remind ourselves that the idea that the world is made up of weightless atoms surprises us because we have experienced the weight of things. Similarly, we could not admire the lightness of language if we had not also learned to admire language endowed with weight. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
I felt in harmony with the disharmony of others, myself, and the world. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
You explode, if that's more to your taste, shoot yourself all around in endless darts, be prodigal, spendthrift, reckless: I shall implode, collapse inside the abyss of myself, towards my buried centre, infinitely. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
There: the white butterfly has crossed the whole valley, and from the reader's book has flown here, to light on the page I am writing. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
I would very much like to be one of those writers who have something really clear in their head to say, and throughout their life they promote this idea in their works. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Try to foresee now everything that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Or else the cloud hovered, having barely left the lips, dense and slow, and suggested another vision: the exhalations that hang over the roofs of the metropolises, the opaque smoke that is not scattered, the hood of miasmata that weighs over the bituminous streets. Not the labile mists of memory nor the dry transparence, but the charring of burned lives that forms a scab on the city, the sponge swollen with vital matter that no longer flows, the jam of past, present, future that blocks existences calcified in the illusion of movement: this is what you would find at the end of your journey. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
There was a town where everything was forbidden.

Now, since the only thing that wasn't forbidden was the game tip-cat, the town's subjects used to assemble on meadows behind the town and spend the day there playing tip-cat.

And as the laws forbidding things had been introduced one at a time and always with good reason, no one found any cause for complaint or had any trouble getting used to them.

Years passed. One day the constables saw that there was no longer any reason why everything should be forbidden and they sent messengers to inform their subjects that they could do whatever they wanted.

The messengers went to those places where the subjects were wont to assemble.

'Hear ye, hear ye,' they announced, 'nothing is forbidden any more.'

The people went on playing tip-cat.

'Understand?' the messengers insisted. 'You are free to do what you want.'

'Good,' replied the subjects. 'We're playing tip-cat.'

The messengers busily reminded them of the many wonderful and useful occupations they had once engaged in and could now engage in once again. But the subjects wouldn't listen and just went on playing, stroke after stroke, without even stopping for a breather.

Seeing that their efforts were in vain, the messengers went to tell the constables.

'Easy,' the constables said. 'Let's forbid the game of tip-cat.'

That was when the people rebelled and killed ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
If I love order, it's not the mark of a character subjected to an inner discipline, a repression of the instincts. In me the idea of an absolutely regular world, symmetrical and methodical, is associated with that first impulse and burgeoning of nature.
The rest of your images that associate passion with disorder, love with intemperate overflow - river fire whirlpool volcano - are for me memories of nothingness and listlessness and boredom. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
His trees were now hung all over with scrawled pieces of paper and bits of cardboard with maxims from Seneca and Shaftesbury, and with various objects; clusters of feathers, church candles, crowns of leaves, women's corsets, pistols, scales, tied to each other in certain order. The Ombrosians used to spend hours trying to guess what those symbols meant: nobles, Pope, virtue, war? I think some of them had no meaning at all but just served to jog his memory and make him realize that even the most uncommon ideas could be right. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Those who arrive at Thekla can see little of the city, beyond the plank fences, the sackcloth screens, the scaffoldings, the metal armatures, the wooden catwalks hanging from ropes or supported by sawhorses, the ladders, the trestles. If you ask, "Why is Thekla's construction taking such a long time?" the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as they answer, "So that its destruction cannot begin. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
At times I am gripped by an absurd desire: that the sentence I am about to write be the one the woman is reading at that same moment. The idea mesmerizes me so much that I convince myself it is true: I write the sentence hastily, get up, go to the window, train my spyglass to check the effect of my sentence in her gaze, in the curl of her lips, in the cigarette she lights, in the shifts of her body in the deck chair, in her legs, which she crosses or extends. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
What is modern art but the attempt to pinpoint vague, incorporeal, inexpressible sensations? What is modern art, I would add, but the most solemn pile of nonsense that ever appeared on Earth? ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Now you mustn't think that I don't have any ideas for novels in my head. I've got ideas for ten novels in my head. But with every idea I have, I already foresee the wrong novels I would write, because I also have critical ideas in my head; I've got a full theory of the perfect novel, and that's what stumps me. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest-for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both-must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled. - Italo Calvino ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee
Italo Calvino quotes by Siddhartha Mukherjee
The public figure of the writer, the writer-character, the 'personality-cult' of the author, are all becoming for me more and more intolerable in others, and consequently in myself. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
My university work was not central to my education. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
With cities, it is as if with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
It is always about themselves that the living ask, not about those who are to come. One man is concerned with leaving behind him an illustrious reputation, another wants his shame to be forgotten; all would like to follow the thread of their own actions' consequences; but ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Despina can be reached in two ways: by ship or by camel. The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea.

When the camel driver sees, at the horizon of the tableland, the pinnacles of the skyscrapers come into view, the radar antennae, the white and red wind-socks flapping, the chimneys belching smoke, he thinks of a ship; he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a vessel that will take him away from the desert, a windjammer about to cast off, with the breeze already swelling the sails, not yet unfurled, or a steamboat with its boiler vibrating in the iron keel; and he thinks of all the ports, the foreign merchandise the cranes unload on the docks, the taverns where crews of different flags break bottles over one another's heads, the lighted, ground-floor windows, each with a woman combing her hair.

In the coastline's haze, the sailor discerns the form of a camel's withers, an embroidered saddle with glittering fringe between two spotted humps, advancing and swaying; he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a camel from whose pack hang wine-skins and bags of candied fruit, date wine, tobacco leaves, and already he sees himself at the head of a long caravan taking him away from the desert of the sea, toward oases of fresh water in the palm trees' jagged shade, toward palaces of thick, whitewashed walls, tiled courts where girls are dancing barefoot, moving their arms, half-hidden by thei ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
That's the good thing about being halved. One understands the sorrow of every person and thing in the world at its own incompleteness. I was whole and did not understand, and moved about deaf and unfeeling amid the pain and sorrow all round us, in places where as a whole person one would least think to find it. It's not only me ... who am a split being, but you and everyone else too. Now I have a fellowship which I did not understand, did not know before, when whole, a fellowship with all the mutilated and incomplete things in the world. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
I write by hand, making many, many corrections. I would say I cross out more than I write. I have to hunt for words when I speak, and I have the same difficulty when writing. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Who are we, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopaedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly reshuffled and reordered in every conceivable way. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
To explode or to implode – said Qfwfq – that is the question: whether 'tis nobler in the mind to expand one's energies in space without restraint, or to crush them into a dense inner concentration. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the sparks that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
From my words you will have reached the conclusion that the real Berenice is a temporal succession of different cities, alternately just and unjust. But what I wanted to warn you about is something else: all the future Berenices are already present in this instant, wrapped one within the other, confined, crammed, inextricable. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
It is not true what everyone always says that the only way to see America is to go across it by car. Apart from the fact that it is impossible given its enormous size, it is also deadly boring. A few outings on the motorway are enough to give an idea of what small-town and even village America is like on average, with the endless suburbs along the highways, a sight of desperate squalor, with all those low buildings, petrol stations or other shops which look like them, and the colours of the writing on the shop signs, and you realize 95 per cent of America is a country of ugliness, oppressiveness and sameness, in short of relentless monotony. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Grown-ups are an untrustworthy, treacherous lot, they don't take their games in the serious wholehearted way children do, and yet they too have their own games, one more serious than the other, one game inside another, so that it's impossible to discover what the real one is. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
I have also thought of a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced," Marco answered. "It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
A stone, a figure, a sign, a word reaching us isolated from its context is only that stone, figure, sign, or word: we can try to define them, to describe them as they are, and no more than that; whether, beside the face they show us, they also have a hidden face, is not for us to know. The refusal to comprehend more than what the stones show us is perhaps the only way to evince respect for their secret; trying to guess is a presumption, a betrayal of that true, lost meaning. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Yell: "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
The living of Laudomia frequent the house of the unborn to interrogate them: footsteps echo beneath the hollow domes; the questions are asked in silence; and it is always about themselves that the living ask, not about those who are to come. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Reader, what are you doing? Aren't you going to resist? Aren't you going to escape? Ah, you are participating ... Ah, you fling yourself into it, too ... You're the absolute protagonist of this book, very well; but do you believe that gives you the right to have carnal relations with all the female characters? Like this, without any preparation..? ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
The Society for the Implementation of Christmas Consumption has launched a campaign to push the Destructive Gift!" (...) "The important thing (...) is that the Destructive Gift serves to destroy articles of every sort: just what's needed to speed up the pace of consumption and give the market a boost... ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Hey live for each other; their eyes are interlocked but there is not love between them. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
An archer, the moment he thinks he's experienced, is lost; every lion we encounter in our brief life is different from every other lion; woe to us if we stop to make comparisons, to deduce our movements from norms and premises. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
KUBLAI: I do not know when you have had time to visit all the countries you describe to me. It seems to me you have never moved from this garden.
POLO: Everything I see and do assumes meaning in a mental space where the same calm reigns as here, the same penumbra, the same silence streaked by the rustling of learn. At the moment when I concentrate and reflect, I find myself again, always, in this garden, at this hour of the evening, in your august presence. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
At times I feel your voice is reaching me from far away, while I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, when all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume. And I hear, from your voice, the invisible reasons which make cities live, through which perhaps, once dead, they will come to life again. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
No one, wise Kublai, knows better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
I look through the spaces between the iron steps at the colorless flow of the river down below, transporting chunks of ice like white clouds. In a distress that lasts an instant, I seem to be feeling what she feels: that every void continues in the void, every gap, even a short one opens another gap, every chasm empties into the infinite abyss. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
I haven't said it yet, but it seemed implied, that cinema for me was the American one, current Hollywood productions. "My" period goes roughly from The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (Henry Hathaway, 1935) with Gary Cooper and Mutiny on the Bounty (Frank Lloyd, 1935) with Charles Laughton and Clark Gable, to the death of Jean Harlow (which I relived many years later like the death of Marilyn Monroe, in an era more aware of the neurotic power of every symbol), with lots of comedies in between, the mystery-romances with Myrna Loy and William Powell and the dog Asta, the musicals of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the crime pictures of Chinese detective Charlie Chan and the horror films of Boris Karloff. I didn't remember the names of the directors as well as the names of the actors, except for a few like Frank Capra, Gregory La Cava, and Frank Borzage, who represented the poor rather than the millionaires, usually with Spencer Tracy: they were the good-natured directors from the Roosevelt era; I learned this later; back then I consumed everything without distinguishing between them too much. American cinema in that moment consisted of a collection of actors' faces without equal before or after (at least it seemed that way to me) and the adventures were simple mechanisms to get these faces together (sweethearts, character actors, extras) in different combinations. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
... Marco's answers and objections took their place in a discourse already proceeding on its own, in the Great Khan's head. That is to say, between the two of them it did not matter whether questions and solutions were uttered aloud or whether each of the two went on pondering in silence. In fact, they were silent, their eyes half-closed, reclining on cushions, swaying in hammocks, smoking long amber pipes.
Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there ... ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Lucretius wants to write the poem of matter, but he warns us from the start that the reality of matter is that it's made of invisible particles. He ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
It's not that you expect anything in particular from this particular book. You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on by light; the hour in which one is least certain of the world's existence. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
My sister always says she loves novels where you feel an elemental strength, primordial, telluric. That's exactly what she says: telluric ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie. I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds. ~ Alan Lightman
Italo Calvino quotes by Alan Lightman
Now that he is no longer here I should be interested in so many things: philosophy, politics, history. I follow the news, read books, but they befuddle me. What he meant to say is not there, for he understood something else, something that was all-embracing, and he could not say it in words but only by living as he did. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts bring with it consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it ... ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
It was the love which the hunter has for living things, and which he can only express by aiming his gun at them ... ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Clarice, the glorious city, has a tormented history. Several times it decayed, then burgeoned again, always keeping the first Clarice as an unparalleled model of every splendor, compared to which the city's present state can only cause more sighs at every fading of the stars. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language ... Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world
qualities that stick to the writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them. ~ Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quotes by Italo Calvino
Supertramp Quotes «
» Invisible Fence Quotes