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Italo Calvino Quotes | Quotes said by Italo Calvino

  • Italo Calvino Quote #1

    - ...Porque, uma vez que você começou - perorava -, não há nenhuma razão para parar. O passo entre a realidade que é fotografada na medida em que nos parece bonita e a realidade que nos parece bonita na medida em que foi fotografada é curtíssimo. Se você fotografa Pierluca enquanto ele está fazendo o castelo de areia, não há razão para não fotografá-lo enquanto está chorando porque o castelo desmoronou, e depois enquanto a ama o consola fazendo-o encontrar no meio da areia uma casquinha de concha. É só você começar a dizer a respeito de alguma coisa: Ah, que bonito, que tinha era que tirar uma foto!, e já está no terreno de quem pensa que tudo o que não é fotografado é perdido, que é como se não tivesse existido, e que então para viver de verdade é preciso fotografar o mais que se possa, e para fotografar o mais que se possa é preciso: ou viver de um modo o mais fotografável possível, ou então considerar fotografáveis todos os momentos da própria vida.

  • Italo Calvino Quote #2

    ...And meanwhile the Galaxy ran through space and left behind those signs old and new and I still hadn't found mine.

  • Italo Calvino Quote #3

    ...eyes that, like those of children, look at an eternal present without forgiveness.

  • Italo Calvino Quote #4

    ...the world was trying to change its old face and show its underbelly of earth and roots.

  • Italo Calvino Quote #5

    [...] mi sembra che il linguaggio venga sempre usato in modo approssimativo, casuale, sbadato, e ne provo un fastidio intollerabile.

  • Italo Calvino Quote #6

    [Brzask] jest to pora, kiedy przedmioty traca konsystencje cienia, jaka darzyla je noc, i odzyskuja po trochu wlasciwe sobie barwy; ale najpierw przechodza jeszcze przez cos niby strefe posrednia, niejasna, zaledwie musniete czy raczej otoczone dokola swiatlem: o tej porze mniej niz kiedykolwiek ma sie pewnosc istnienia swiata.

  • Italo Calvino Quote #7

    …Marco’s answers and objections took their place in a discourse already proceeding on its own, in the Great Khan’s head. That is to say, between the two of them it did not matter whether questions and solutions were uttered aloud or whether each of the two went on pondering in silence. In fact, they were silent, their eyes half-closed, reclining on cushions, swaying in hammocks, smoking long amber pipes.

    Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that 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 Quote #8

    ¿Qué importa el nombre del autor en la portada? Trasladémonos con el pensamiento a tres mil años de aquí. Quién sabe qué libros se habrán salvado de nuestra época, y de quién sabe qué autores se recordará aún el nombre. Habrá libros que seguirán siendo famosos, pero que serán considerados obras anónimas, como para nosotros la epopeya de Gilgamesh; habrá autores cuyo nombre será siempre famoso, pero de los que no quedará ninguna obra, como sucedió con Sócrates; o quizá todos los libros supervivientes se atribuirán a un único autor misterioso, como Homero.

  • Italo Calvino Quote #9

    1 )Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.
    2)A classic is a work which constantly generates a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse around it, but which always shakes the particles off.

  • Italo Calvino Quote #10

    A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

  • Italo Calvino Quote #11

    A classic is a book that has never finished what it wants to say.

  • Italo Calvino Quote #12

    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 Quote #13

    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. If this is not the case, then humanity becomes — as it is already to a large extent — no more than a rabbit-warren. But this is no longer a “free-range” warren but a “battery” one, in the conditions of artificiality in which it lives, with artificial light and chemical feed.

  • Italo Calvino Quote #14

    again I am torn between the necessity and the impossibility of answering.

  • Italo Calvino Quote #15

    although science interests me just because of its efforts to escape from anthropomorphic knowledge, I am nonetheless convinced that our imagination cannot be anything but anthropomorphic.

  • Italo Calvino Quote #16

    Amusement has always been the great moving force behind culture.

  • Italo Calvino Quote #17

    And, thinking of this judgment I would no longer be able to change, I suddenly felt a kind of relief, as if peace could come to me only after the moment when there would be nothing to add and nothing to remove in that arbitrary ledger of misunderstandings, and the galaxies which were gradually reduced to the last tail of the last luminous ray, winding from the sphere of darkness, seemed to bring with them the only possible truth about myself, and I couldn’t wait until all of them, one after the other, had followed this path.

  • Italo Calvino Quote #18

    As far as you are able to gather from hints scattered through these letters, Apocryphal Power, riven by internecine battles and eluding the control of its founder, Ermes Marana, has broken into two groups: a sect of enlightened followers of the Archangel of Light and a sect of nihilist followers of the Archon of Shadow. The former are convinced that among the false books flooding the world they can track down the few that bear a truth perhaps extrahuman or extraterrestrial. The latter believe that only counterfeiting, mystification, intentional falsehood can represent absolute value in a book, a truth not contaminated by the dominant pseudo truths.

  • Italo Calvino Quote #19

    As Raimbaut dragged a dead man along he thought, ‘Oh
    corpse, I have come rushing here only to be dragged along by the
    heels like you. What is this frenzy that drives me, this mania for
    battle and for love, when seen from the place where your staring
    eyes gaze and your flung-back head knocks over stones? It’s that
    I think of, oh corpse, it’s that you make me think of: but does anything
    change? Nothing. No other days exist but these of ours
    before the tomb, both for us the living and for you the dead. May
    it be granted me not to waste them, not to waste anything of what
    I am, of what I could be: to do deeds helpful to the Frankish cause:
    to embrace, to be embraced by, proud Bradamante. I hope you
    spent your days no worse, oh corpse. Anyway to you the dice have already shown their numbers. For me they are still whirling in the
    box. And I love my own disquiet, corpse, not your peace.

  • Italo Calvino Quote #20

    Bagisla beni efendimiz: er geç o rihtima çikacagim kuskusuz, der Marco, ama dönüp sana anlatamayacagim onu. Böyle bir kent var, ve de basit bir sirri var: yalniz gidisleri bilir, dönüsleri bilmez.

  • Italo Calvino Quote #21

    But Ludmilla is always at least one step ahead of you. “I like to know that book exists that I will still be able to read…” she says, sure that existent objects, concrete albeit unknown, must correspond to the strength of her desire. How can you keep up with her, this woman who is always reading another book besides the one before her eyes, a book that does not yet exist, but which, since she wants it, cannot fail to exist?

  • Italo Calvino Quote #22

    Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours. or to the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx.

  • Italo Calvino Quote #23

    Começa-se a escrever com todo o ânimo, mas chega uma altura em que a pena não risca mais que uma tinta poeirenta e não escorre nem uma gota de vida. E a vida está toda lá fora, para além da janela, longe de ti, e parece que nunca mais poderás refugiar-te na página que escreveste, abrir um outro mundo e lançar-te nele. Talvez seja melhor assim; talvez, quando escrevia com alegria, não fosse milagre nem graça, mas pecado, idolatria, soberba. Então, estou fora? Não, escrevendo não me tornei melhor, apenas dissipei, um pouco, a ansiosa e inconsciente juventude. Que me valerão estas páginas descontentes? O livro, o voto, não valerão mais que tu. Nunca se disse que escrevendo se salva a alma. Escreve, escreve, e a tua alma já está perdida.

  • Italo Calvino Quote #24

    Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

  • Italo Calvino Quote #25

    Don't you ever get tired of reading? she asked. You could hardly be called good company! Don't you know that, with women, you're supposed to make conversation? she added; her half smile was perhaps meant to be ironic, though to Amedeo, who at that moment would have paid anything rather than give up his novel, it seemed downright threatening.

  • Italo Calvino Quote #26

    É clássico aquilo que persiste como rumor mesmo onde predomina a atualidade mais incompatível.

  • Italo Calvino Quote #27

    Every morning I tell myself, 'Today has to be productive' - and then something happens that prevents me from writing.

  • Italo Calvino Quote #28

    Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.

  • Italo Calvino Quote #29

    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 Quote #30

    From mirror to mirror — this is what I happen to dream of — the totality of things, the whole, the entire universe, divine wisdom could concentrate their luminous rays into a single mirror. Or perhaps the knowledge of everything is buried in the soul, and a system of mirrors that would multiply my image would then reveal to me the soul of the universe, which is hidden in mine.

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