Italo Calvino Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?

  Italo Calvino

  Book, Information, Ifs

  Italo Calvino (1988). “Six Memos for the Next Millennium”, p.124, Harvard University Press

  40 Copy quote

• 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

  Travel, Distance, Clouds

  51 Copy quote

• Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.

  Italo Calvino

  Mean, World, Dissolving

  Italo Calvino (1988). “Six Memos for the Next Millennium”, p.9, Harvard University Press

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• The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.

  Italo Calvino

  Cat, Animal, Men

  Italo Calvino (2012). “Marcovaldo: or the Seasons in the City”, p.107, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  31 Copy quote

• 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

  Believe, Men, Two

  Italo Calvino (2013). “The Watcher and Other Stories”, p.12, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  30 Copy quote

• 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

  11 Copy quote

• Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears.

  Italo Calvino

  Dream, Cities, Desire

  "Invisible Cities". Book by Italo Calvino, 1972.

  8 Copy quote

• ...Life is nothing but trading smells.

  Italo Calvino

  Smell, Life Is, Trading

  Italo Calvino (2012). “If on a winter's night a traveler”, p.76, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Kissing, Flavor, Taste

  4 Copy quote

• 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)

  9 Copy quote

• Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered.

  Italo Calvino

  Truth, Writing, Mean

  Italo Calvino (2012). “If on a winter's night a traveler”, p.205, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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

  Goal, Achievement, Tasks

  Italo Calvino (1988). “Six Memos for the Next Millennium”, p.112, Harvard University Press

  4 Copy quote

• Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.

  Italo Calvino

  Police, Irony, States

  Italo Calvino (2012). “If on a winter's night a traveler”, p.247, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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

  Bridges, Emergencies, Invisible

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Country, Important, World

  6 Copy quote

• The soul is often in the surface, and the importance of 'depth' is overestimated.

  Italo Calvino

  Design, Soul, Depth

  6 Copy quote

• The minute you start saying something, 'Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!' you are already close to view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore, in order really to live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second to madness.

  Italo Calvino

  Beautiful, Thinking, Order

  27 Copy quote

• 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

  Distance, Eye, Light

  15 Copy quote

• Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.

  Italo Calvino

  Honesty, Falsehood

  Italo Calvino (2013). “Invisible Cities”, p.70, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities.

  Italo Calvino

  Looks, Littles, Capability

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• 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

  Opposites, Space, Duration

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• 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

  60 Copy quote

• At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.

  Italo Calvino

  Mirrors, Deny, Increase

  Italo Calvino (2013). “Invisible Cities”, p.62, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  12 Copy quote

• seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space

  Italo Calvino

  Space, Giving, Inferno

  Italo Calvino, Michael Wood, Martin L. McLaughlin (2013). “Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985”, p.13, Princeton University Press

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• The novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible.

  Italo Calvino

  Illusion, Obscure, Knots

  "If On A Winter's Night A Traveller".

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