Top 280 Italo Calvino Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “A writer’s work has to take account of many rhythms: Vulcan’s and Mercury’s, a message of urgency obtained by dint of patient and meticulous adjustments and an intuition so instantaneous that, when formulated, it acquires the finality of something that could never have been otherwise. But it is also the rhythm of time that passes with no other aim than to let feelings and thoughts settle down, mature, and shed all impatience or ephemeral contingency.”

— Italo Calvino

102. “The soul is often in the surface, and the importance of ‘depth’ is overestimated.”

— Italo Calvino

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

— Italo Calvino

104. “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 and, whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them.”

— Italo Calvino

105. “Chi vuole guardare bene la terra deve tenersi alla distanza necessaria.”

— Italo Calvino

106. “Listening to someone read aloud is very different from reading in silence. When you read, you can stop or skip sentences: you are the one who sets the pace. When someone else is reading, it is difficult to make your attention coincide with the tempo of his reading: the voice goes either too fast or too slow.”

— Italo Calvino

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

— Italo Calvino

108. “The fact is that I find in the day’s light, in this diffused, pale, almost shadowless luminosity, a darkness deeper than the night’s.”

— Italo Calvino

109. “Now that he is no longer here I should be interested in so many things: philosophy, politics, history. I follow the news, read books, but they befuddle me. What he meant to say is not there, for he understood something else, something that was all-embracing, and he could not say it in words but only by living as he did.”

— Italo Calvino

110. “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. So here I am walking along this empty surface that is the world.”

— Italo Calvino

111. “They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other.”

— Italo Calvino

112. “For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.”

— Italo Calvino

113. “It’s all very well for me to tell myself there are no provincial cities any more and perhaps there never were any: 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

114. “Her breast was young, the nipples rosy. Cosimo just grazed it with his lips, before Viola slid away over the branches as if she were flying, with him clambering after her, and that skirt of hers always in his face.”

— Italo Calvino

115. “I, on the contrary, have been convinced for some time that perfection is not produced except marginally and by chance; therefore it deserves no interest at all, the true nature of things being revealed only in disintegration.”

— Italo Calvino

116. “The art of writing tales consists in an ability to draw the rest of life from the little one has understood of it; but life begins again at the end of the page, and one realises that one has knew nothing whatsoever.”

— Italo Calvino

117. “Each second is a universe, the second I live is the second I live in.”

— Italo Calvino

118. “What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?”

— Italo Calvino

119. “It’s better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.”

— Italo Calvino

120. “POLO: Everything I see and do assumes meaning in a mental space where the same calm reigns as here, the same penumbra, the same silence streaked by the rustling of learn. At the moment when I concentrate and reflect, I find myself again, always, in this garden, at this hour of the evening, in your august presence, though I continue, without a moment’s pause, moving up a river green with crocodiles or counting the barrels of salted fish being lowered into the hold.”

— Italo Calvino

121. “I do not have any political commitments anymore. I’m politically a total agnostic; I’m one of the few writers in Italy who refuses to be identified with a specific political party.”

— Italo Calvino

122. “With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”

— Italo Calvino

123. “There: the white butterfly has crossed the whole valley, and from the reader’s book has flown here, to light on the page I am writing.”

— Italo Calvino

124. “So our efforts led us to become those perfect objects of a sense whose nature nobody quite knew yet, and which later became perfect precisely through the perfection of its object, which was, in fact, us. I’m talking about sight, the eyes; only I had failed to foresee one thing: the eyes that finally opened to see us didn’t belong to us but to others.”

— Italo Calvino

125. “Perinthia’s astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations are wrong and their figures are unable to describe the heavens, or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters.”

— Italo Calvino

126. “Finito il turno Arturo torna a casa, alle volte un po’ dopo e alle volte un po’ prima che suoni la sveglia della moglie, Elide. Lei, stirandosi con “una specie di dolcezza pigra”, gli mette le braccia al collo, e dal suo giaccone capisce il tempo che fa fuori.”

— Italo Calvino

127. “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.”

— Italo Calvino

128. “Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.”

— Italo Calvino

129. “Praise to be the stars that implode. A new freedom opens up within them: annulled from space, exonerated from time, existing at last, for themselves alone and no longer in relation to all the rest, perhaps only they can be sure they really exist.”

— Italo Calvino

130. “Andria was built so artfully that its every street follows a planet’s orbit, and the buildings and the places of community life repeat the order of the constellations and the position of the most luminous stars: Antares, Alpheratz, Capricorn, the Cepheids.”

— Italo Calvino

131. “I rather enjoy that sense of bewilderment a novel gives you when you start reading it, but if the first effect is fog, I’m afraid the moment the fog lifts my pleasure in reading will be lost, too.”

— Italo Calvino

132. “This is what I wanted to hear from you: confess what you are smuggling: moods, states of grace, elegies!”

— Italo Calvino

133. “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

134. “What is more natural than that a solidarity, a complicity, a bond should be established between Reader and Reader, thanks to the book?”

— Italo Calvino

135. “Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.”

— Italo Calvino

136. “In general confusion youth recognizes itself and rejoices.”

— Italo Calvino

137. “We live in a country where causes are always seen but never effects.”

— Italo Calvino

138. “But already ships were vanishing over the horizon and I was left behind, in this world of ours full of responsibilities and will-o’-the-wisps.”

— Italo Calvino

139. “Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do,′ Arkadian Porpirych says. ‘What statistic allows one to identify the nations where literature enjoys true consideration better than the sums appropriated for controlling it and suppressing it? Where it is the object of such attentions, literature gains an extraordinary authority, inconceivable in countries where it is allowed to vegetate as an innocuous pastime, without risks.”

— Italo Calvino

140. “Or else, given that there is world that side of the window and world this side, perhaps the “I,” the ego, is simply the window through which the world looks at the world.”

— Italo Calvino

141. “At times I feel your voice is reaching me from far away, while I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, when all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume. And I hear, from your voice, the invisible reasons which make cities live, through which perhaps, once dead, they will come to life again.”

— Italo Calvino

142. “It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible.”

— Italo Calvino

143. “The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to concern himself with the world that repels him.”

— Italo Calvino

144. “Reading,” he says, “is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead...”

— Italo Calvino

145. “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

146. “All that can be done is for each of us to invent our own ideal library of our classics; and I would say that one half of it would consist of books we have read and that have meant something for us and the other half of books which we intend to read and which we suppose might mean something to us. We should also leave a section of empty spaces for surprises and chance discoveries.”

— Italo Calvino

147. “I read, therefore it writes.”

— Italo Calvino

148. “There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive. They are announcements or presages that concern me and the world at once: for my part, not only the external events of my existence but also what happens inside, in the depths of me; and for the world, not some particular event but the general way of being of all things.”

— Italo Calvino

149. “The Sultan’s wife must never remain without books that please her: a clause in the marriage contract is involved, a condition the bride imposed on her august suitor before agreeing to the wedding...”

— Italo Calvino

150. “If there is nothing that needs correcting in the world memory, the only thing left to do is to correct reality where it doesn’t agree with that memory.”

— Italo Calvino