Italo Calvino Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• 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

  Cities, Giving, Delight

  16 Copy quote

• You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger's passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are.

  Italo Calvino

  Flower, Eye, Winter

  Italo Calvino (2013). “Invisible Cities”, p.21, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  19 Copy quote

• The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.

  Italo Calvino

  Sea, Body, Creatures

  Italo Calvino (2014). “The Complete Cosmicomics”, p.217, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Moments, Lost, Found

  Italo Calvino (2014). “Numbers in the Dark”, p.10, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  28 Copy quote

• For the man who thought he was Man there is no salvation.

  Italo Calvino

  Men, He Man, Salvation

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Silence, Stories, Buried

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

  25 Copy quote

• 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

  Distance, Lying, Order

  41 Copy quote

• Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.

  Italo Calvino

  Thinking, Sometimes, Young

  Italo Calvino (2012). “The Cloven Viscount”, p.103, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  23 Copy quote

• The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand

  Italo Calvino

  Past, Hands, Cities

  Italo Calvino (2013). “Invisible Cities”, p.19, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  11 Copy quote

• Fantasy is like jam. . . . You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing . . . out of which you can’t make anything.

  Italo Calvino

  Jam, Pieces, Bread

  23 Copy quote

• Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images.

  Italo Calvino

  Photography, Ifs

  Italo Calvino (2017). “Difficult Loves”, p.72, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  22 Copy quote

• 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

  Zero, Moving, Mean

  Italo Calvino (2010). “If On A Winter's Night A Traveller”, p.15, Random House

  15 Copy quote

• I had fallen in love. What I mean is: I had begun to recognize, to isolate the signs of one of those from the others, in fact I waited for these signs I had begun to recognize, I sought them, responded to those signs I awaited with other signs I made myself, or rather it was I who aroused them, these signs from her, which I answered with other signs of my own . . .

  Italo Calvino

  Mean, Facts, Made

  Italo Calvino (2014). “The Complete Cosmicomics”, p.168, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Cities, Lost, Quarters

  "Le citta invisibili (Invisible Cities)". Book by Italo Calvino, 1974.

  15 Copy quote

• You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.

  Italo Calvino

  Book, Journey, People

  Italo Calvino (2012). “If on a winter's night a traveler”, p.16, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  Memories, Cities, Venice

  31 Copy quote

• 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

  Race, Break Off, Two

  25 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Lines, Statistics

  Italo Calvino (2012). “If on a winter's night a traveler”, p.165, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Expression, People, Mind

  Italo Calvino (2013). “Invisible Cities”, p.103, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Italo Calvino

  Believe, People, Essentials

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Moon, Doubt, Looks

  Italo Calvino (1986). “Mr. Palomar”, p.42, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  11 Copy quote

• Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.

  Italo Calvino

  Revolution, Revolutionary

  18 Copy quote

• 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

  Running, Stars, Moving

  9 Copy quote

• To write well about the elegant world you have to know it and experience it to the depths of your being... what matters is not whether you love it or hate it, but only to be quite clear about your position regarding it.

  Italo Calvino

  Hate, Writing, What Matters

  Italo Calvino (2013). “Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985”, p.47, Princeton University Press

  9 Copy quote

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