Top 280 Italo Calvino Quotes (2024 Update)
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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. “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

54. “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

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. “Tutti abbiamo una ferita segreta per riscattare la quale combattiamo.”

— Italo Calvino

63. “Reading is solitude. One reads alone, even in another’s presence.”

— Italo Calvino

64. “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

65. “The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past:.”

— 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. “Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.”

— Italo Calvino

68. “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

69. “Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms.”

— Italo Calvino

70. “Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes.”

— 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. “Desires are already memories.”

— Italo Calvino

74. “The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand.”

— Italo Calvino

75. “Leave me like this. I have come full circle and I understand. The world must be read backward. All is clear.”

— Italo Calvino

76. “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

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. “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

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

— Italo Calvino

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.”

— Italo Calvino

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

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. “One reads alone, even in another’s presence.”

— Italo Calvino

97. “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

98. “The world is so complicated, tangled, and overloaded that to see into it with any clarity you must prune and prune. In.”

— Italo Calvino

99. “Life, thought the naked man, was a hell, with rare moments recalling some ancient paradise.”

— Italo Calvino

100. “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