Italo Calvino quotes - page 2

Italo Calvino was an Italian writer celebrated for his imaginative novels and short stories. Renowned for works such as "Invisible Cities" and "If on a winter's night a traveler," his literature blends fantasy, philosophy, and playful narrative techniques. He is considered one of the most important Italian authors of the twentieth century. Here are 85 of his quotes:

...we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.

Italo Calvino

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand.

Italo Calvino

Don't ask where the rest of this book is!" It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. "All books continue in the beyond...

Italo Calvino

Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me." Polo answers: "Without stones there is no arch.

Italo Calvino

Gore is a man without an unconscious.

Italo Calvino

What makes love making and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.

Italo Calvino

Then we have computer science. It is true that software cannot exercise its powers of lightness except through the weight of hardware. But it is the software that gives the orders, acting on the outside world and on machines that exist only as functions of software and evolve so that they can work out ever more complex programs. The second industrial revolution, unlike the first, does not present us with such crushing images as rolling mills and molten steel, but with "bits" in a flow of information traveling along circuits in the form of electronic impulses. The iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits.

Italo Calvino

He was carried away by that mania of the storyteller, who never knows which stories are more beautiful-the ones that really happened and the evocation of which recalls a whole flow of hours past, of petty emotions, boredom, happiness, insecurity, vanity, and self-disgust, or those which are invented, and in which he cuts out a main pattern, and everything seems easy, then begins to vary it as he realizes more and more that he is describing again things that had happened or been understood in lived reality.

Italo Calvino

Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

Italo Calvino

You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.

Italo Calvino

Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.

Italo Calvino

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

Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.

Italo Calvino

The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.

Italo Calvino

Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.

Italo Calvino

I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.

Italo Calvino

Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.

Italo Calvino

The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.

Italo Calvino

The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.

Italo Calvino

Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst.

Italo Calvino

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

I set my hand to the art of writing early on. Publishing was easy for me, and I at once found favor and understanding. But it was a long time before I realized and convinced myself that this was anything but mere chance. Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb. 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.

Italo Calvino