Italo Calvino Quotes - Page 4

Quotes about:

• 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

  Motivational, Travel, Lying

  11 Copy quote

• How well I would write if I were not here!

  Italo Calvino

  Writing, Wells, Ifs

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

• what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller 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

  Lying, Past, Journey

  10 Copy quote

• So began their love, the boy happy and amazed, she happy and not surprised at all (nothing happens by chance to girls). It was the love so long awaited by Cosimo and which had now inexplicably arrived, and so lovely that he could not imagine how he had even thought it lovely before. And the thing newest to him was that it was so simple, and the boy at that moment thought it must be like that always.

  Italo Calvino

  Girl, Boys, Simple

  4 Copy quote

• Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.

  Italo Calvino

  Memories, Cities, Redundant

  Italo Calvino (2013). “Invisible Cities”, p.27, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  8 Copy quote

• Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.

  Italo Calvino

  Past, Branches

  5 Copy quote

• One reads alone, even in another's presence.

  Italo Calvino

  Italo Calvino (2012). “If on a winter's night a traveler”, p.159, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  6 Copy quote

• The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.

  Italo Calvino

  Inevitability Of Death, Two, Continuity Of Life

  Italo Calvino (2010). “If On A Winter's Night A Traveller”, p.259, Random House

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Inspiration, Finding The One, Genius

  Italo Calvino (2017). “The Uses of Literature”, p.21, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Cities, Shapes, Ends

  16 Copy quote

• …we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.

  Italo Calvino

  Thinking, Disappear, Fragments

  Italo Calvino (2012). “If on a winter's night a traveler”, p.20, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Morning, Night, Light

  Italo Calvino (2012). “The Nonexistent Knight”, p.23, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  8 Copy quote

• Something must always remain that eludes us ... For power to have an object on which it can be exercised, a space in which to stretch out its arms ... As long as I know there exists in the world someone who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading's sake, I can convince myself that the world continues ... And every evening I, too, abandon myself to reading, like that distant unknown woman.

  Italo Calvino

  Reading, Elude Us, Space

  8 Copy quote

• Memory really matters...only if it binds together the imprint of the past and the project of the future, if it enables us to act without forgetting what we wanted to do, to become without ceasing to be, and to be without ceasing to become.

  Italo Calvino

  Memories, Past, Together

  4 Copy quote

• Whether there is such a thing as Reality, of which the various levels are only partial aspects, or whether there are only levels, is something that literature cannot decide. Literature recognizes rather the *reality of the levels.*

  Italo Calvino

  Reality, Literature, Levels

  10 Copy quote

• Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.

  Italo Calvino

  Stars, Fall, Sunset

  Italo Calvino (2013). “Invisible Cities”, p.135, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Travel, Mirrors, Negative

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• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Sex, Reading, Space

  Italo Calvino (2010). “If On A Winter's Night A Traveller”, p.156, Random House

  7 Copy quote

• We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.

  Italo Calvino

  Men, World, Instruments

  Italo Calvino (2017). “The Uses of Literature”, p.302, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  5 Copy quote

• In general confusion youth recognizes itself and rejoices.

  Italo Calvino

  Confusion, Youth, Rejoice

  Italo Calvino (2012). “If on a winter's night a traveler”, p.93, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  5 Copy quote

• I could distinguish the shape of her bosom, her arms, her thighs, just as I remember them now, just as now, when the Moon has become that flat, remote circle, I still look for her as soon as the first sliver appears in the sky, and the more it waxes, the more clearly I 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 the Moon and, whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them.

  Italo Calvino

  Dog, Moon, Night

  Italo Calvino (2014). “The Complete Cosmicomics”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  5 Copy quote

• Success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search... for the sentence in which every word is unalterable.

  Italo Calvino

  Inspiration, Writing, Expression

  Italo Calvino (1988). “Six Memos for the Next Millennium”, p.48, Harvard University Press

  7 Copy quote

• Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings...if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough.

  Italo Calvino

  Book, Reading, Imagination

  17 Copy quote

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