Top 280 Italo Calvino Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “But the others also had wronged the Z’zus, to begin with, by calling them ‘immigrants’, on the pretext that, since the others had been there first, the Z’zus had come later. 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

255. “Soon space became filled again, and dense, like a vineyard just before vintage time, and we flew on, escaping from one another, my galaxy fleeing the younger ones as it had the older, and young and old fleeing us.”

— Italo Calvino

256. “Try to foresee now everything that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best.”

— Italo Calvino

257. “But the memory of the old life that returned to my mind was the endless series of defeats, of flights, of dangers; to begin again meant perhaps only a temporary extension of that death agony, the return to a phase I thought had already ended.”

— Italo Calvino

258. “This is already true now, when you are still occupied, each with the other’s presence, in an exclusive fashion. Imagine how it will be in a little while, when ghosts that do not meet will frequent your minds, accompanying the encounters of your bodies tested by habit.”

— Italo Calvino

259. “It just wasn’t possible to make him accept a reality different from his own.”

— Italo Calvino

260. “Writing consists no longer in narrating but in sayin that one is narrating, and what one says becomes identified with the very act of saying. The psychological person is replaced by a linguistic or even a grammatical person, defined solely by his place in the discourse.”

— Italo Calvino

261. “One gets used to persisting in one’s habits, to finding oneself isolated for good reasons, to putting up with the discomfort that this causes, to finding the right way to hold on to positions which are not shared by the majority.”

— Italo Calvino

262. “For Leopardi, unhappy hedonist that he was, what is unknown is always more attractive than what is known; hope and imagination are the only consolations for the disappointments and sorrows of experience. Man therefore projects his desire into infinity and feels pleasure only when he is able to imagine that this pleasure has no end.”

— Italo Calvino

263. “The past is like a tapeworm, constantly growing, which I carry curled up inside me, and it never loses its rings no matter how hard I try to empty my guts in every WC, English-style or Turkish, or in the slop jars of prison or the bedpans of hospitals or the latrines of camps, or simply in the bushes, taking a good look first to make sure no snake will pop out, like that time in Venezuela.”

— Italo Calvino

264. “Ayl was a happy inhabitant of the silence that reigns where all vibration is excluded; for her anything that looked likely to break the absolute visual neutrality was a harsh discord; beauty began for her only where the greyness had extinguished even the remotest desire to be anything other than grey.”

— Italo Calvino

265. “There is a story that for me comes before all other stories and of which all the stories I read seem to carry an echo, immediately lost. In my readings I do nothing but seek that book read in my childhood, but what I remember of it is too little to enable me to find it again.”

— Italo Calvino

266. “Vuoto separazione e attesa, questo siamo.”

— Italo Calvino

267. “On sober reflection, you prefer it this way, confronting something and not quite knowing yet what it is.”

— Italo Calvino

268. “We can know nothing about what is outside us if we overlook ourselves, he thinks now. The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves.”

— Italo Calvino

269. “Man is simply the best chance we know of that matter has had of providing itself with information about itself.”

— Italo Calvino

270. “Reality, ugly or beautiful as it may be, is something I cannot change.”

— Italo Calvino

271. “There is still, in fact, in Calvino’s archive a drawer full of newspaper cuttings concerning scientific discoveries. As.”

— Italo Calvino

272. “In the seed of the city of the just, a malignant seed is hidden, in its turn: the certainty and pride of being in the right – and of being more just than the many others who call themselves more just than the just. This seed ferments in bitterness, rivalry, resentment; and the natural desire for revenge on the unjust is colored by a yearning to be in their place and to act as they do.”

— Italo Calvino

273. “Of course, if I chose to be an optimist, there was always the possibility that, if our two parallels continued to infinity, the moment would come when they would touch.”

— Italo Calvino

274. “I have come to realize that Mr. Kauderer’s presence is important for me: that someone still evinces so much scrupulousness and methodical attention, though I know perfectly well it is all futile, has a reassuring effect on me perhaps because it makes up for my vague way of living, about which – despite the conclusions I have reached – I continue to feel guilty.”

— Italo Calvino

275. “I expect readers to read in my books something I didn’t know, but I can expect it only from those who expect to read something they didn’t know.”

— Italo Calvino

276. “You know you are somewhat impulsive, but you have learned to control yourself. The thing that most exasperates you is to find yourself at the mercy of the fortuitous, the aleatory, the random, in things and in human actions – carelessness, approximation, imprecision, whether your own or others’. In such instances your dominant passion is the impatience to erase the disturbing effects of that arbitrariness or distraction, to re-establish the normal course of events.”

— Italo Calvino

277. “Here in Turin you can write because past and future have greater prominence than the present, the force of past history and the anticipation of the future give a concreteness and sense to the discrete, ordered images of today. Turin is a city which entices the reader towards vigour, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way toward madness.”

— Italo Calvino

278. “I had seen much more than that, I had visited the world of the things that could have been, and I couldn’t drive it from my mind. And I had known the beauty kept prisoner in the heart of that world, the beauty lost for me and for all of us, and I had fallen in love with it.”

— Italo Calvino

279. “Undertakings based on an inner tenacity have to be mute and obscure; one has only to declare or glory in them and it all appears silly, without meaning, even petty.”

— Italo Calvino

280. “That was a time when I didn’t give a damn about anything, the period when I came to settle in this city. “Settle” is the wrong term. I had no desire to be settled in any sense;.”

— Italo Calvino

281. “But our mother, the most distant from him, perhaps, seemed the only one who could accept him as he was, maybe because she didn’t try to find an explanation.”

— Italo Calvino

282. “And at the bottom of each of those eyes I lived, or rather another me lived, one of the images of me, and it encountered the image of her, the most faithful image of her, in that beyound which opens, past the semiliquid sphere of the irises, in the darkness of the pupils, the mirrored hall of retinas, in our true element which extends without shores, without boundaries.”

— Italo Calvino

283. “We were peering into this darkness, crisscrossed with voices, when the change took place: the only real, great change I’ve ever happened to witness, and compared to it the rest is nothing.”

— Italo Calvino

284. “Your reading is no longer solitary: you think of the Other Reader, who, at this same moment, is also opening the book; and there, the novel to be read is superimposed by a possible novel to be lived, the continuation of your story with her, or better still, the beginning of a possible story.”

— Italo Calvino

285. “What if it were as they say? If, while I believe I am writing in fun, what I write were really dictated by the extraterrestrials?”

— Italo Calvino

286. “The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea.”

— Italo Calvino

287. “If one starts to draw comparisons between what is and what is not, it is the poorer qualities of the former that strike you, the impurities, the flaws; in short, you can only really feel safe with nothingness.”

— Italo Calvino

288. “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