Italo Calvino Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.

  Italo Calvino

  Cities, People, Stories

  Italo Calvino (1988). “Six Memos for the Next Millennium”, p.3, Harvard University Press

  60 Copy quote

• Fantasy is like jam. . . . You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing . . . out of which you can’t make anything.

  Italo Calvino

  Jam, Pieces, Bread

  23 Copy quote

• Renouncing things is less difficult than people believe: it's all a matter of getting started. Once you've succeeded in dispensing with something you thought essential, you realize you can also do without something else, then without many other things.

  Italo Calvino

  Believe, People, Essentials

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Cities, Lost, Quarters

  "Le citta invisibili (Invisible Cities)". Book by Italo Calvino, 1974.

  15 Copy quote

• You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger's passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are.

  Italo Calvino

  Flower, Eye, Winter

  Italo Calvino (2013). “Invisible Cities”, p.21, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  19 Copy quote

• Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.

  Italo Calvino

  Honesty, Falsehood

  Italo Calvino (2013). “Invisible Cities”, p.70, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Cities, Giving, Delight

  16 Copy quote

• The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.

  Italo Calvino

  Sea, Body, Creatures

  Italo Calvino (2014). “The Complete Cosmicomics”, p.217, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  6 Copy quote

• Yet, even now, ever time (often) that I find that I don't understand something, then instinctively, I'm filled with the hope that perhaps this will be my moment again, perhaps once again I shall understand nothing, I shall grasp that other knowledge, found and lost in an instant.

  Italo Calvino

  Moments, Lost, Found

  Italo Calvino (2014). “Numbers in the Dark”, p.10, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  28 Copy quote

• Very often the effort men put into activities that seem completely useless turns out to be extremely important in ways no one could foresee. Play has always been the mainspring of culture.

  Italo Calvino

  Men, Playing Games, Effort

  24 Copy quote

• It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible

  Italo Calvino

  Writing, Immensity

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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Space, Giving, Inferno

  Italo Calvino, Michael Wood, Martin L. McLaughlin (2013). “Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985”, p.13, Princeton University Press

  6 Copy quote

• Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.

  Italo Calvino

  Thinking, Sometimes, Young

  Italo Calvino (2012). “The Cloven Viscount”, p.103, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  23 Copy quote

• 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.

  Italo Calvino

  Silence, Stories, Buried

  Italo Calvino (2017). “The Uses of Literature”, p.24, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  25 Copy quote

• 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.

  Italo Calvino

  Mother, Finals, World

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

  22 Copy quote

• In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogenous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.

  Italo Calvino

  Running, Communication, Differences

  "Six Memos for the Next Millennium". Book by Italo Calvino. Translated by Patrick Creagh, 1996.

  4 Copy quote

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

  Italo Calvino

  Past, Hands, Cities

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

  12 Copy quote

• 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. . . .

  Italo Calvino

  Zero, Moving, Mean

  Italo Calvino (2010). “If On A Winter's Night A Traveller”, p.15, Random House

  15 Copy quote

• Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images.

  Italo Calvino

  Photography, Ifs

  Italo Calvino (2017). “Difficult Loves”, p.72, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  11 Copy quote

• Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order and rhythm; or else someone's gaze, answer, gesture is enough; it is enough for someone to do something for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and for his pleasure to become the pleasure of others: at that moment, all spaces change, all heights, distances; the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline, transparent as a dragonfly.

  Italo Calvino

  Distance, Lying, Order

  41 Copy quote

• Memory really matters...only if it binds together the imprint of the past and the project of the future, if it enables us to act without forgetting what we wanted to do, to become without ceasing to be, and to be without ceasing to become.

  Italo Calvino

  Memories, Past, Together

  4 Copy quote

• Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.

  Italo Calvino

  Travel, Mirrors, Negative

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Memories, Cities, Venice

  31 Copy quote

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

  Italo Calvino

  Race, Should, Humans

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Italo Calvino

  Book, Journey, People

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

  17 Copy quote

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