Italo Calvino quotes - page 3

And he waves the pages of the papers, black and white the way space was when the galaxies were being formed, and crammed-as space was then-with isolated corpuscles, surrounded by emptiness, containing no destination or meaning. And I think how beautiful it was then, through that void, to draw lines and parabolas, pick out the precise point, the intersection between space and time where the event would spring forth, undeniable in the prominence of its glow; whereas now events come flowing down without interruption, like cement being poured, one column next to the other, one within the other, separated by black and incongruous headlines.... (Italo Calvino)
What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts. View quote
Italo Calvino
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. View quote
Italo Calvino
A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading. View quote
Italo Calvino
I write by hand, making many, many corrections. I would say I cross out more than I write. I have to hunt for words when I speak, and I have the same difficulty when writing. View quote
Italo Calvino
One should be light like a bird and not like a feather. View quote
Italo Calvino
I felt a kind of vertigo, as if I were merely plunging from one world to another, and in each I arrived shortly after the end of the world had taken place. View quote
Italo Calvino
Folktales are real. View quote
Italo Calvino
Politics is marginal, but literature moves along by indirection. View quote
Italo Calvino
New York is a fabled city, a fabulous city. View quote
Italo Calvino
Reading is a possession, a march toward a possession. (Italo Calvino)
I do not have any political commitments anymore. I'm politically a total agnostic; I'm one of the few writers in Italy who refuses to be identified with a specific political party. View quote
Italo Calvino
I feel so at home in New York that I don't have the urge to write about it. View quote
Italo Calvino
Thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy. View quote
Italo Calvino
Nature in America does not arouse powerful emotions in me. View quote
Italo Calvino
If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space. View quote
Italo Calvino
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. View quote
Italo Calvino
To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in a place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished. View quote
Italo Calvino
This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts bring with it consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it. . . . View quote
Italo Calvino
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. View quote
Italo Calvino
The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest-for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both-must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story. (Italo Calvino)
Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words. View quote
Italo Calvino
You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst. View quote
Italo Calvino
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 .... View quote
Italo Calvino
Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives. View quote
Italo Calvino