Italo Calvino was an Italian writer and journalist. His best-known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy, the Cosmicomics collection of short stories, and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter’s night a traveler.
Italo Calvino Quotes
1. “Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.”
— Italo Calvino
2. “I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!”
— Italo Calvino
3. “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears.”
— Italo Calvino
4. “Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images.”
— Italo Calvino
5. “The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.”
— Italo Calvino
6. “The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.”
— Italo Calvino
7. “Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered.”
— Italo Calvino
8. “You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”
— Italo Calvino
9. “Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.”
— Italo Calvino
10. “A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.”
— Italo Calvino
11. “It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.”
— Italo Calvino
12. “Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.”
— Italo Calvino
13. “The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.”
— Italo Calvino
14. “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
— Italo Calvino
15. “The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.”
— Italo Calvino
16. “I felt in harmony with the disharmony of others, myself, and the world.”
— Italo Calvino
17. “Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.”
— Italo Calvino
18. “My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.”
— Italo Calvino
19. “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.”
— Italo Calvino
20. “Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book.”
— Italo Calvino
21. “There is no language without deceit.”
— Italo Calvino
22. “When I’m writing a book I prefer not to speak about it, because only when the book is finished can I try to understand what I’ve really done and to compare my intentions with the result.”
— Italo Calvino
23. “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
24. “Nobody looks at the moon in the afternoon, and this is the moment when it would most require our attention, since its existence is still in doubt.”
— Italo Calvino
25. “The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves.”
— Italo Calvino
26. “L’umano arriva dove arriva l’amore, non ha confini se non quelli che gli diamo.”
— Italo Calvino
27. “They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.”
— Italo Calvino
28. “Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.”
— Italo Calvino
29. “While the hemlock was being prepared, Socrates was learning a melody on the flute. “What use will that be to you?”, he was asked. “At least I will learn this melody before I die.”
— Italo Calvino
30. “In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.”
— Italo Calvino
31. “Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.”
— Italo Calvino
32. “Memories images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.”
— Italo Calvino
33. “Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one’s mother’s womb.”
— Italo Calvino
34. “You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.”
— Italo Calvino
35. “I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.”
— Italo Calvino
36. “Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.”
— Italo Calvino
37. “The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions.”
— Italo Calvino
38. “Then Marco Polo spoke: “Your chessboard, sire, is inlaid with two woods: ebony and maple. The square on which your enlightened gaze is fixed was cut from the ring of a trunk that grew in a year of drought: you see how its fibers are arranged? Here a barely hinted knot can be made out: a bud tried to burgeon on a premature spring day, but the night’s frost forced it to desist.”
— Italo Calvino
39. “The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.”
— Italo Calvino
40. “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”
— Italo Calvino
41. “A map of Esmeralda should include, marked in different colored inks, all these routes, solid and liquid, evident and hidden. It is more difficult to fix on the map the routes of the swallows, who cut the air over the roofs, dropping long invisible parabolas with their still wings, darting to gulp a mosquito, spiraling upward, grazing a pinnacle, dominating from every point of their airy paths all the points of the city.”
— Italo Calvino
42. “To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in a place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished.”
— Italo Calvino
43. “It is within you that the ghosts acquire voices.”
— Italo Calvino
44. “You’ll understand when you’ve forgotten what you understood before.”
— Italo Calvino
45. “In abortion, the person who is massacred, physically and morally, is the woman.”
— Italo Calvino
46. “Of course, the ideal position for reading is something you can never find.”
— Italo Calvino
47. “Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst.”
— Italo Calvino
48. “When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign – a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don’t want to hear the word mentioned.”
— Italo Calvino
49. “In politics, as in every other sphere of life, there are two important principles for a man of any sense: don’t cherish too many illusions, and never stop believing that every little bit helps.”
— Italo Calvino
50. “Reading is solitude.”
— Italo Calvino
51. “Perhaps my true vocation was that of author of apocrypha, in the several meanings of the term: because writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered; because the truth that can come from my pen is like a shard that has been chipped from a great boulder by a violent impact, then flung far away; because there is no certitude outside falsification.”
— Italo Calvino
52. “All places communicate instantly with all other places, a sense of isolation is felt only during the trip between one place and the other, that is, when you are in no place.”
— Italo Calvino
53. “These cities grew in approximately the same places as our cities do now, however different the shape of the continents was. There was even a New York that in some way resembled the New York familiar to all of you, but was much newer, or, rather, more awash with new products, new toothbrushes, a New York with its own Manhattan that stretched out dense with skyscrapers gleaming like the nylon bristles of a brand-new toothbrush.”
— Italo Calvino
54. “If on a winter’s night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave-What story down there awaits its end?-he asks, anxious to hear the story.”
— Italo Calvino
55. “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.”
— Italo Calvino
56. “Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.”
— Italo Calvino
57. “The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.”
— Italo Calvino
58. “Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. “There is the blueprint,” they say.”
— Italo Calvino
59. “Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.”
— Italo Calvino
60. “If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.”
— Italo Calvino
61. “I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses.”
— Italo Calvino
62. “Reading is solitude. One reads alone, even in another’s presence.”
— Italo Calvino
63. “Tutti abbiamo una ferita segreta per riscattare la quale combattiamo.”
— Italo Calvino
64. “The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past:.”
— Italo Calvino
65. “Stations are all alike; it doesn’t matter if the lights cannot illuminate beyond their blurred halo, all of this is a setting you know by heart, with the odor of train that lingers even after all the trains have left, the special odor of stations after the last train has left. The lights of the station and the sentences you are reading seem to have the job of dissolving more than of indicating the things that surface from a veil of darkness and fog.”
— Italo Calvino
66. “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
67. “Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.”
— Italo Calvino
68. “Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.”
— Italo Calvino
69. “Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes.”
— Italo Calvino
70. “Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms.”
— Italo Calvino
71. “Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.”
— Italo Calvino
72. “At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.”
— Italo Calvino
73. “The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand.”
— Italo Calvino
74. “The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.”
— Italo Calvino
75. “Desires are already memories.”
— Italo Calvino
76. “Leave me like this. I have come full circle and I understand. The world must be read backward. All is clear.”
— Italo Calvino
77. “You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.”
— Italo Calvino
78. “Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?”
— Italo Calvino
79. “It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.”
— Italo Calvino
80. “Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.”
— Italo Calvino
81. “The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.”
— Italo Calvino
82. “Very often the effort men put into activities that seem completely useless turns out to be extremely important in ways no one could foresee. Play has always been the mainspring of culture.”
— Italo Calvino
83. “So you begin to wonder if Leonia’s true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity.”
— Italo Calvino
84. “What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one’s nose, taking shortcuts.”
— Italo Calvino
85. “If a lover is wretched who invokes kisses of which he knows not the flavor, a thousand times more wretched is he who has had a taste of the flavor and then had it denied him.”
— Italo Calvino
86. “A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.”
— Italo Calvino
87. “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
88. “Cosimo sat in the ash tree every day, gazing at the meadow as if he could read in it something that had long been consuming him inside: the very idea of distance, of the gap that can’t be bridged, of the wait that can last longer than life.”
— Italo Calvino
89. “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
90. “The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.”
— Italo Calvino
91. “One reads alone, even in another’s presence.”
— Italo Calvino
92. “Now that the book is finished, I know that this was not a hallucination, a sort of professional malady, but the confirmation of something I already suspected – folktales are real.”
— Italo Calvino
93. “There is someone looking through the befogged glass, he opens the glass door of the bar, everything is misty, inside, too, as if seen by nearsighted eyes, or eyes irritated by coal dust.”
— Italo Calvino
94. “Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie.”
— Italo Calvino
95. “Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement.”
— Italo Calvino
96. “A writer’s work has to take account of many rhythms: Vulcan’s and Mercury’s, a message of urgency obtained by dint of patient and meticulous adjustments and an intuition so instantaneous that, when formulated, it acquires the finality of something that could never have been otherwise. But it is also the rhythm of time that passes with no other aim than to let feelings and thoughts settle down, mature, and shed all impatience or ephemeral contingency.”
— Italo Calvino
97. “The world is so complicated, tangled, and overloaded that to see into it with any clarity you must prune and prune. In.”
— Italo Calvino
98. “Are you depressed or euphoric? The house, in its wisdom, seems to have taken advantage of your moments of euphoria to prepare itself to shelter you in your moments of depression.”
— Italo Calvino
99. “Life, thought the naked man, was a hell, with rare moments recalling some ancient paradise.”
— Italo Calvino
100. “Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.”
— Italo Calvino
101. “Chi vuole guardare bene la terra deve tenersi alla distanza necessaria.”
— Italo Calvino
102. “The soul is often in the surface, and the importance of ‘depth’ is overestimated.”
— Italo Calvino
103. “Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities.”
— Italo Calvino
104. “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
105. “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
106. “The novels that attract me most… are those that create an illusion of transperancy around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel and perverse as possible.”
— Italo Calvino
107. “Imagine I can see her, her or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand different vistas, she who makes the Moon and, whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them.”
— Italo Calvino
108. “Listening to someone read aloud is very different from reading in silence. When you read, you can stop or skip sentences: you are the one who sets the pace. When someone else is reading, it is difficult to make your attention coincide with the tempo of his reading: the voice goes either too fast or too slow.”
— Italo Calvino
109. “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
110. “For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.”
— Italo Calvino
111. “It’s all very well for me to tell myself there are no provincial cities any more and perhaps there never were any: all places communicate instantly with all other places, a sense of isolation is felt only during the trip between one place and the other, that is, when you are in no place.”
— Italo Calvino
112. “Her breast was young, the nipples rosy. Cosimo just grazed it with his lips, before Viola slid away over the branches as if she were flying, with him clambering after her, and that skirt of hers always in his face.”
— Italo Calvino
113. “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
114. “What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?”
— Italo Calvino
115. “It’s better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.”
— Italo Calvino
116. “Renouncing things is less difficult than people believe: it’s all a matter of getting started. Once you’ve succeeded in dispensing with something you thought essential, you realize you can also do without something else, then without many other things. So here I am walking along this empty surface that is the world.”
— Italo Calvino
117. “I, on the contrary, have been convinced for some time that perfection is not produced except marginally and by chance; therefore it deserves no interest at all, the true nature of things being revealed only in disintegration.”
— Italo Calvino
118. “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, though I continue, without a moment’s pause, moving up a river green with crocodiles or counting the barrels of salted fish being lowered into the hold.”
— Italo Calvino
119. “The art of writing tales consists in an ability to draw the rest of life from the little one has understood of it; but life begins again at the end of the page, and one realises that one has knew nothing whatsoever.”
— Italo Calvino
120. “I do not have any political commitments anymore. I’m politically a total agnostic; I’m one of the few writers in Italy who refuses to be identified with a specific political party.”
— Italo Calvino
121. “Each second is a universe, the second I live is the second I live in.”
— Italo Calvino
122. “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
123. “This is what I wanted to hear from you: confess what you are smuggling: moods, states of grace, elegies!”
— Italo Calvino
124. “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
125. “Perinthia’s astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations are wrong and their figures are unable to describe the heavens, or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters.”
— Italo Calvino
126. “Finito il turno Arturo torna a casa, alle volte un po’ dopo e alle volte un po’ prima che suoni la sveglia della moglie, Elide. Lei, stirandosi con “una specie di dolcezza pigra”, gli mette le braccia al collo, e dal suo giaccone capisce il tempo che fa fuori.”
— Italo Calvino
127. “You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more.”
— Italo Calvino
128. “Praise to be the stars that implode. A new freedom opens up within them: annulled from space, exonerated from time, existing at last, for themselves alone and no longer in relation to all the rest, perhaps only they can be sure they really exist.”
— Italo Calvino
129. “With cities, it is as 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. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”
— Italo Calvino
130. “I rather enjoy that sense of bewilderment a novel gives you when you start reading it, but if the first effect is fog, I’m afraid the moment the fog lifts my pleasure in reading will be lost, too.”
— Italo Calvino
131. “So our efforts led us to become those perfect objects of a sense whose nature nobody quite knew yet, and which later became perfect precisely through the perfection of its object, which was, in fact, us. I’m talking about sight, the eyes; only I had failed to foresee one thing: the eyes that finally opened to see us didn’t belong to us but to others.”
— Italo Calvino
132. “In general confusion youth recognizes itself and rejoices.”
— Italo Calvino
133. “We live in a country where causes are always seen but never effects.”
— Italo Calvino
134. “But already ships were vanishing over the horizon and I was left behind, in this world of ours full of responsibilities and will-o’-the-wisps.”
— Italo Calvino
135. “Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do,′ Arkadian Porpirych says. ‘What statistic allows one to identify the nations where literature enjoys true consideration better than the sums appropriated for controlling it and suppressing it? Where it is the object of such attentions, literature gains an extraordinary authority, inconceivable in countries where it is allowed to vegetate as an innocuous pastime, without risks.”
— Italo Calvino
136. “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
137. “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
138. “Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.”
— Italo Calvino
139. “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
140. “Andria was built so artfully that its every street follows a planet’s orbit, and the buildings and the places of community life repeat the order of the constellations and the position of the most luminous stars: Antares, Alpheratz, Capricorn, the Cepheids.”
— Italo Calvino
141. “Or else, given that there is world that side of the window and world this side, perhaps the “I,” the ego, is simply the window through which the world looks at the world.”
— Italo Calvino
142. “It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible.”
— Italo Calvino
143. “There is little I can tell you about Aglaura beyond the things its own inhabitants have always repeated: an array of proverbial virtues, of equally proverbial faults, a few eccentricities, some punctilious regard for rules.”
— Italo Calvino
144. “I have finally come around to asking myself what is expressed in that sand of written words which I have strung together throughout my life, that sand that seems to me to be so far away from the beaches and desert of living. Perhaps by staring at the sand as sand, words as words, we can come close to understanding how and to what extent the world that has been ground down and eroded can still find in sand a foundation and model.”
— Italo Calvino
145. “We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.”
— Italo Calvino
146. “My brother maintains,” I answered, “that those who wish to look carefully at the earth should stay at the necessary distance,” and Voltaire very much admired the answer.”
— Italo Calvino
147. “There is no better place to keep a secret than in an unfinished novel.”
— Italo Calvino
148. “When you’ve waited two hundred million years, you can also wait six hundred;.”
— Italo Calvino
149. “I read, therefore it writes.”
— Italo Calvino
150. “There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive. They are announcements or presages that concern me and the world at once: for my part, not only the external events of my existence but also what happens inside, in the depths of me; and for the world, not some particular event but the general way of being of all things.”
— Italo Calvino
151. “What is more natural than that a solidarity, a complicity, a bond should be established between Reader and Reader, thanks to the book?”
— Italo Calvino
152. “Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.”
— Italo Calvino
153. “But who can say that the clock’s numbers aren’t peeping from rectangular windows, where I see every minute fall on me with a click like the blade of a guillotine?”
— Italo Calvino
154. “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
155. “If I were to draw, I would apply myself only to studying the form of inanimate objects,” I said somewhat imperiously, because I wanted to change the subjects and also because a natural inclination does truly lead me to recognise my moods in the motionless suffering of things.”
— Italo Calvino
156. “She’s there every day,′ the writer says. ‘Every time I’m about to sit down at my desk I feel the need to look at her. Who knows what she’s reading? I know it isn’t a book of mine, and instinctively I suffer at the thought, I feel the jealousy of my books, which would like to be read the way she reads. I never tire of watching her: she seems to live in a sphere suspended in another time and another space.”
— Italo Calvino
157. “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?”
— Italo Calvino
158. “Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.”
— Italo Calvino
159. “Reading,” he says, “is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead…”
— Italo Calvino
160. “All that can be done is for each of us to invent our own ideal library of our classics; and I would say that one half of it would consist of books we have read and that have meant something for us and the other half of books which we intend to read and which we suppose might mean something to us. We should also leave a section of empty spaces for surprises and chance discoveries.”
— Italo Calvino
161. “How well I would write if I were not here!”
— Italo Calvino
162. “The city outside there has no name yet, we don’t know if it will remain outside the novel or whether the whole story will be contained within its inky blackness. I know only that this first chapter is taking a while to break free of the station and the bar: it is not wise for me to move away from here where they might still come looking for me, or for me to be seen by other people with this burdensome suitcase.”
— Italo Calvino
163. “The Sultan’s wife must never remain without books that please her: a clause in the marriage contract is involved, a condition the bride imposed on her august suitor before agreeing to the wedding…”
— Italo Calvino
164. “A child’s pleasure in listening to stories lies partly in waiting for things he expects to be repeated: situations, phrases, formulas. Just as in poems and songs the rhymes help to create the rhythm, so in prose narrative there are events that rhyme.”
— Italo Calvino
165. “The unique book, which contains the whole, could only be the sacred text, the total word revealed. But I do not believe totality can be contained in language; my problem is what remains outside, the unwritten, the unwritable. The only way left me is that of writing all books, writing the books of all possible authors.”
— Italo Calvino
166. “If there is nothing that needs correcting in the world memory, the only thing left to do is to correct reality where it doesn’t agree with that memory.”
— Italo Calvino
167. “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
168. “We can prevent reading: but in the decree that forbids reading there will be still read something of the truth that we would wish never to be read.”
— Italo Calvino
169. “The more time passed, the less happened. The more they felt something must happen, the more the bailiffs realized they had to do something but the less they understood what it was.”
— Italo Calvino
170. “To fall asleep like a bird. To have a wing you could stick your head under, a world of branches suspended above the earthly world, barely glimpsed down below, muffled and remote. Once you begin rejection your present state, there is no knowing where you can arrive.”
— Italo Calvino
171. “Yes, you are in your room, calm; you open the book to page one, no, to the last page, first you want to see how long it is. It’s not too long, fortunately. Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.”
— Italo Calvino
172. “A gentleman, my Lord Father, is such whether he is on earth or on the treetops.”
— Italo Calvino
173. “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
174. “A model is by definition that in which nothing has to be changed, that which works perfectly; whereas reality, as we see clearly, does not work and constantly falls to pieces; so we must force it, more or less roughly, to assume the form of the model.”
— Italo Calvino
175. “When I got here my first thought was: Maybe I achieved such an effort with my thoughts that time has made a complete revolution; here I am at the station from which I left on my first journey, it has remained as it was then, without any change. All the lives that I could have led begin here; there is the girl who could have been my girl and wasn’t, with the same eyes, the same hair…”
— Italo Calvino
176. “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
177. “A me – dice – piacciono i libri in cui tutti i misteri e le angosce passano attraverso una mente esatta e fredda e senza ombre come quella d’un giocatore di scacchi.”
— Italo Calvino
178. “The facility of the entrance into another world is an illusion: you start writing in a rush, anticipating the happiness of a future reading, and the void yawns on the white page.”
— Italo Calvino
179. “And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.”
— Italo Calvino
180. “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.”
— Italo Calvino
181. “We’ll invent new ways of being together.”
— Italo Calvino
182. “Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.”
— Italo Calvino
183. “It seems impossible, in a big city like Paris, but you can waste hours looking for the right place to burn up a corpse.”
— Italo Calvino
184. “Let me make one thing clear: this theory that the universe, after having reached an extremity of rarefaction, will be condensed again has never convinced me. And yet many of us are counting only on that, continually making plans for the time when we’ll all be back there again.”
— Italo Calvino
185. “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 brings with it its 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
186. “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
187. “To be able to read the classics you have to know “from where” you are reading them; otherwise both the book and the reader will be lost in a timeless cloud.”
— Italo Calvino
188. “In an existence like mine forecasts could not be made: I never know what could happen to me in the next half hour, I can’t imagine a life all made up of minimal alternatives, carefully circumscribed, on which bets can be made: either this or that.”
— Italo Calvino
189. “Think what it would be like to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to cement, to plastic.”
— Italo Calvino
190. “As soon as I set foot there, everything I had imagined was forgotten; Pyrrha had become what is Pyrrha; and I thought I had always known.”
— Italo Calvino
191. “Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.”
— Italo Calvino
192. “But in vain I set out to visit the city: forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her.”
— Italo Calvino
193. “An outsider was taking my place, was becoming me, my cage with the starlings would become his, the stereoscope, the real Uhlan helmet hanging from a nail, all my things that I couldn’t take with me remained to him; or, rather, it was my relationship with things, places, people, that was becoming his, just as I was about to become him, to take his place among the things and people of his life.”
— Italo Calvino
194. “Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order and rhythm; or else someone’s gaze, answer, gesture is enough; it is enough for someone to do something for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and for his pleasure to become the pleasure of others: at that moment, all spaces change, all heights, distances; the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline, transparent as a dragonfly.”
— Italo Calvino
195. “Only in a superficial sense can lies be said to exclude the truth; you will be aware that in many cases lies- the patient’s lies to the psychoanalyst- are just as revealing as the truth, if not more so…”
— Italo Calvino
196. “The universe and the void: I’ll return to these two terms, between which swings the aim of literature, and which often seem to mean the same thing.”
— Italo Calvino
197. “In addition there is the fact that this girl’s application in drawing seashells denotes in her a search for formal perfection which the world can and therefore must attain; I, on the contrary, have been convinced for some time that perfection is not produced except marginally and by chance; Therefore it deserves no interest at all, the true nature of things being revealed only in disintegration.”
— Italo Calvino
198. “Meanwhile, in the satisfaction you receive from her way of reading you, from the textual quotations of your physical objectivity, you begin to harbor a doubt: that she is not reading you, single and whole as you are, but using you, using fragments of you detached from the context to construct for herself a ghostly partner, known to her alone, in the penumbra of her semiconsciousness, and what she is deciphering is this apocryphal visitor, not you.”
— Italo Calvino
199. “This is the paradox of the power of literature: it seems that only when it is persecuted does it show its true powers, challenging authority, whereas in our permissive society it feels that it is being used merely to create the occasional pleasing contrast to the general ballooning of verbiage.”
— Italo Calvino
200. “We were still in the boundless void, striped here and there by a streak or two of hydrogen around the vortexes of the first constellations. I admit it required very complicated deductions to foresee the Mesopotamian plains black with men and horses and arrows and trumpets, but, since I had nothing else to do, I could bring it off.”
— Italo Calvino
