Quotes by
Italo Calvino |
1923-1985 , Italian writer
Journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known book the Invisible Cities (1972). Other works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979).He was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death.
| 22 quotes | 1,617 visits |
Quotations
| • | The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death. 3 |
| • | Falsehood is never in words; it is in things. 2 |
| • | Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches. 2 |
| • | The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner. |
| • | In politics, as in every other sphere of life, there are two important principles for a man of any sense: don’t cherish too many illusions, and never stop believing that every little bit helps. |
| • | Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. |
| • | Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie. |
| • | Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives. |
| • | Your first book already defines you, while you are really far from being defined. And this definition is something you may then carry with you for the rest of your life, trying to confirm it or extend or correct or deny it; but you can never eliminate it. |
| • | The soul is often in the surface, and the importance of “depth” is overestimated. |
| • | 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. |
| • | A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. |
| • | Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? |
| • | It is not the voice that commands the story. It is the ear. |
| • | 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. |
| • | You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours. |
| • | The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand. |
| • | At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it. |
| • | A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading. |
| • | In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision. |
| • | The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions. |
| • | You’ll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before. |
