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Top 280 Italo Calvino Quotes (2024 Update)
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Italo Calvino Quote: “We were still in the boundless void, striped here and there by a streak or two of hydrogen around the vortexes of the first constellations. I admit it required very complicated deductions to foresee the Mesopotamian plains black with men and horses and arrows and trumpets, but, since I had nothing else to do, I could bring it off.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.”
Italo Calvino 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 Quote: “Because in this way all I did was to accumulate past after past behind me, multiplying the pasts, and if one life was too dense and ramified and embroiled for me to bear it always with me, imagine so many lives, each with its own past and the pasts of the other lives that continue to become entangled one with the others.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “Reader, it is time for your tempest-tossed vessel to come to port. What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library? Certainly there is one in the city from which you set out and to which you have returned after circling the world from book to book.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “At times I am gripped by an absurd desire: that the sentence I am about to write be the one the woman is reading at that same moment. The idea mesmerizes me so much that I convince myself it is true: I write the sentence hastily, get up, go to the window, train my spyglass to check the effect of my sentence in her gaze, in the curl of her lips, in the cigarette she lights, in the shifts of her body in the deck chair, in her legs, which she crosses or extends.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “The novels I prefer, are those that make you feel uneasy from the very first page.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “Meanwhile, what do you do? How do you occupy this absence of yourself from the world and of the world from you? You read; you do not raise your eyes from the book between one airport and the other, because beyond the page there is the void, the anonymity of stopovers, of the metallic uterus that contains you and nourishes you, of the passing crowd always different and always the same.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “Contemplating the stars he has become accustomed to considering himself an anonymous and incorporeal dot, almost forgetting that he exists; to deal now with human beings, he cannot help involving himself, and he no longer knows where his self is to be found.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “At times it seems to me that the distance between my writing and her reading is unbridgeable, that whatever I write bears the stamp of artifice and incongruity; if what I am writing were to appear on the polished surface of the page she is reading, it would rasp like a fingernail on a pane, and she would fling the book away with horror.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “Meanwhile, in the satisfaction you receive from her way of reading you, from the textual quotations of your physical objectivity, you begin to harbor a doubt: that she is not reading you, single and whole as you are, but using you, using fragments of you detached from the context to construct for herself a ghostly partner, known to her alone, in the penumbra of her semiconsciousness, and what she is deciphering is this apocryphal visitor, not you.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “This is the paradox of the power of literature: it seems that only when it is persecuted does it show its true powers, challenging authority, whereas in our permissive society it feels that it is being used merely to create the occasional pleasing contrast to the general ballooning of verbiage.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “Readers are my vampires.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “Now, the old man happened to be the Lord.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “A conversation with Miss Zwida would lead me inevitably to talk about seashells, and I cannot decide what attitude to take, whether to pretend absolute ignorance or to call on a remote experience now vague; it is my relationship with my life, consisting of things never concluded and half erased, that the subject of seashells forces me to contemplate; hence the uneasiness that finally puts me to flight.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “I am a prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “In museums I always enjoy stopping at the Saint Jeromes.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “Decide for yourself. Everybody reacts in a different way.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “Cold has a thousand ways of moving in the world: on the sea it gallops like a troop of horses, on the countryside it falls like a swarm of locusts, in the cities like a knife-blade it slashes the streets and penetrates the chinks of unheated houses.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “This prospect was in absolute contradiction to the optimism in which we children of the coast had been brought up, and I opposed the idea with shocked protests. But for me the true, living confutation of those arguments was Lll: in her I saw the perfect, definitive form, born from the conquest of the land that had emerged; she was the sum of the new boundless possibilities that had opened. How could my great-uncle try to deny the incarnate reality of Lll?”
Italo Calvino Quote: “For the man who thought he was Man there is no salvation.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “The one contains what is accepted as necessary when it is not yet so; the others, what is imagined as possible and, a moment later, is possible no longer.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “Escape, is one of those words I cannot hear without abandoning myself to endless ruminations.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “Most of the books I have written and those I intend to write originate from the thought that it will be impossible for me to write a book of that kind: when I have convinced myself that such a book is completely beyond my capacities of temperament or skill, I sit down and start writing it.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “In short, what you are doing is very beautiful but grammatically it doesn’t change a thing. At the moment when you most appear to be a united voi, a second person plural, you are two tu’s, more separate and circumscribed than before.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “Cities have no name for me: they are places without leaves, separating one pasture from another, and where the goats are frightened at street corners and scatter. The dog and I run to keep the flock together.” “I am the opposite of you,” I said. “I recognize only cities and cannot distinguish what is outside them. In uninhabited places each stone and each clump of grass mingles, in my eyes, with every other stone and dump.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “He knows the conspirators are waiting for a sign from the Sultana to light the fuse, but she has given orders never to disturb her while she is reading, not even if the palace were about to blow up...”
Italo Calvino Quote: “A publishing house is a fragile organism, dear sir,” he says. “If at any point something goes askew, then the disorder spreads, chaos opens beneath our feet. Forgive me, won’t you? When I think about it I have an attack of vertigo.” And he covers his eyes, as if pursued by the sight of billions of pages, lines, words, whirling in a dust storm.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “The only books I recognize as mine are those I must still write.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “I look through the spaces between the iron steps at the colorless flow of the river down below, transporting chunks of ice like white clouds. In a distress that lasts an instant, I seem to be feeling what she feels: that every void continues in the void, every gap, even a short one opens another gap, every chasm empties into the infinite abyss.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “Forgive me if I have a kind of allergic reaction to all words that hint of nationalism...”
Italo Calvino Quote: “Cosimo did not yet know love, and what is any experience without that? What point is there in risking life, when the real flavor of life is as yet unknown?”
Italo Calvino Quote: “Perhaps, for each of them, I also resembled someone who was dead. I had barely arrived at Adelma and I was already one of them, I had gone over to their side, absorbed in that kaleidescope of eyes, wrinkles, grimaces.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “I must, however, bear in mind that my every move to erase previous events provokes a rain of new events, which complicate the situation worse than before and which I will then, in their turn, have to try to erase.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “Will I ever be able to say, “Today it writes,” just like “Today it rains,” “Today it is windy”?”
Italo Calvino Quote: “All this is like a dream which the word bears within itself and which, passing through him who writes, is freed and frees him.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “Long-time inhabitant of steeples, accustomed to contemplating, from his perch on a rainspout, the expanse of roofs, he knew that the souls of cities are more substantial and more lasting than those of all their inhabitants put together.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “If the spark doesn’t come, that’s a pity; but we do not read the classics out of duty or respect, but only out of love.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single homogeneous 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 Quote: “This was mere unfounded prejudice – that seems obvious to me – because neither before nor after existed, nor any place to immigrate from, but there were those who insisted that the concept of “immigrant” could be understood in the abstract, outside of space and time.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “At this point we must remind ourselves that the idea that the world is made up of weightless atoms surprises us because we have experienced the weight of things. Similarly, we could not admire the lightness of language if we had not also learned to admire language endowed with weight.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “I’m accustomed to thinking of literature as a search for knowledge; in order to move onto existential terrain I need to consider it in relation to anthropology, ethnology, and mythology.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “Everything in the garden was like that: lovely but impossible to enjoy properly, with that worrying feeling inside that they were only there through an odd stroke of luck, and the fear that they’d soon have to give an account of themselves.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “Does the written word tame passions? Or subdue the forces of nature? Or does it find a harmony with the inhumanity of the universe? Or incubate a violence, held back but always ready to spring, to claw?”
Italo Calvino Quote: “Amusement has always been the great moving force behind culture.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “The process going on today is the triumph of discontinuity, divisibility, and combination over all that is flux, or a series of minute nuances following one upon the other.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “And a keen jealousy invades me, not of other people, but of that me made of ink and periods and commas, who wrote the novels I will write no more, the author who continues to enter the privacy of this young woman, while I, I here and now, with the physical energy I feel surging, much more reliable than the creative impulse, I am separated from her by the immense distance of a keyboard and a white page on the roller.”
Italo Calvino Quote: “It is my image that I want to multiply, but not out of narcissism or megalomania, as could all too easily be believed: on the contrary, I want to conceal, in the midst of so many illusory ghosts of myself, the true me, who makes them move.”
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