Italo Calvino Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• 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

  Cities, People, Stories

  Italo Calvino (1988). “Six Memos for the Next Millennium”, p.3, Harvard University Press

• 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

  Mother, Finals, World

  Italo Calvino (2017). “The Uses of Literature”, p.347, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• 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

  Ocean, Land, Language

  "Cybernetics and Ghosts" (1969)

• 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

  Struggle, Literature, Limits

  Italo Calvino (2017). “The Uses of Literature”, p.24, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• You have with you the book you were reading in the cafe, which you are eager to continue, so that you can then hand it on to her, to communicate again with her through the channel dug by others' words, which, as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and hers, a language, a code between the two of you, a means to exchange signals and recognize each other.

  Italo Calvino

  Book, Reading, Mean

• There is no language without deceit.

  Italo Calvino

  Deceit, Language

  Italo Calvino (2013). “Invisible Cities”, p.56, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• 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

  Writing, Cities, People

  "Six Memos For This Millennium" by Sam Cooney, therumpus.net. November 22, 2010.

• In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogenous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.

  Italo Calvino

  Running, Communication, Differences

  "Six Memos for the Next Millennium". Book by Italo Calvino. Translated by Patrick Creagh, 1996.

• The close-up has no equivalent in a narrative fashioned of words. Literature is totally lacking in any working method to enable it to isolate a single vastly enlarged detail in which one face comes forward to underline a state of mind or stress the importance of a single detail in comparison with the rest. As a narrative device, the ability to vary the distance between the camera and the object may be a small thing indeed, but it makes for a notable difference between cinema and oral or written narrative, in which the distance between language and image is always the same.

  Italo Calvino

  Distance, Stress, Differences

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