Italo Calvino Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Italo Calvino

  Art, Book, Literature

  Italo Calvino (2017). “The Uses of Literature”, p.134, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  70 Copy quote

• It is within you that the ghosts acquire voices.

  Italo Calvino

  Voice, Ghost, Within You

  Italo Calvino (2012). “Under the Jaguar Sun”, p.56, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  Dream, Cities, Perspective

  "Invisible Cities". Book by Italo Calvino, www.theguardian.com. 1972.

  67 Copy quote

• A person's life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that is not chronological but, rather, corresponds to an inner architecture.

  Italo Calvino

  Order, Events, Lasts

  Italo Calvino (1986). “Mr. Palomar”, p.132, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  70 Copy quote

• The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves

  Italo Calvino

  Mirrors, Contemplating, Knows

  Italo Calvino (1985). “Mr. Palomar”, Harcourt

  50 Copy quote

• It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.

  Italo Calvino

  Communication, Voice, Stories

  "Invisible Cities". Book by Italo Calvino, ch. 9, 1974.

  46 Copy quote

• 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.

  Italo Calvino

  People, And Love, Casual

  Italo Calvino (2013). “Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985”, p.454, Princeton University Press

  62 Copy quote

• Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.

  Italo Calvino

  Police, Irony, States

  Italo Calvino (2012). “If on a winter's night a traveler”, p.247, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  5 Copy quote

• Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.

  Italo Calvino

  Book, Style, Library

  9 Copy quote

• The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.

  Italo Calvino

  Travel, Natural, Exile

  Italo Calvino (2017). “The Uses of Literature”, p.347, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  44 Copy quote

• The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

  Italo Calvino

  Two, Space, Giving

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

  67 Copy quote

• You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before

  Italo Calvino

  Forgotten, Understood

  Italo Calvino (2014). “The Complete Cosmicomics”, p.204, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  13 Copy quote

• Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don't mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification.

  Italo Calvino

  Dream, Believe, Mean

  "Six Memos for the Next Millennium".

  12 Copy quote

• The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

  Italo Calvino

  Past, Hands, Cities

  Italo Calvino (2013). “Invisible Cities”, p.19, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  8 Copy quote

• Memories images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.

  Italo Calvino

  Memories, Fixed

  Italo Calvino (2013). “Invisible Cities”, p.94, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  9 Copy quote

• In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.

  Italo Calvino

  Love, Matter, Pleasure

  10 Copy quote

• Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie.

  Italo Calvino

  Lying, Novelists, Pieces

  9 Copy quote

• They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.

  Italo Calvino

  Able, Known

  25 Copy quote

• It is only after you have come to know the surface of things ... that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.

  Italo Calvino

  Venture, Surface, Knows

  Italo Calvino (1986). “Mr. Palomar”, p.63, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  8 Copy quote

• You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.

  Italo Calvino

  Worst, Knows

  Italo Calvino (2012). “If on a winter's night a traveler”, p.16, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  6 Copy quote

• Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.

  Italo Calvino

  Mean, World, Dissolving

  Italo Calvino (1988). “Six Memos for the Next Millennium”, p.9, Harvard University Press

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Italo Calvino

  Believe, Men, Two

  Italo Calvino (2013). “The Watcher and Other Stories”, p.12, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  30 Copy quote

• It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.

  Italo Calvino

  Real, Book, Reading

  "Enter the maze" by David Mitchell, www.theguardian.com. May 22, 2004.

  7 Copy quote

• What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?

  Italo Calvino

  Library, Harbors

  Italo Calvino (2012). “If on a winter's night a traveler”, p.265, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  12 Copy quote

• 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.

  Italo Calvino

  Ocean, Land, Language

  "Cybernetics and Ghosts" (1969)

  10 Copy quote

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