Italo Calvino
Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?Collection: Book
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.Collection: Opposites
The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.Collection: Cat
seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them spaceCollection: Space
Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities.Collection: Looks
If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.Collection: Distance
The minute you start saying something, 'Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!' you are already close to view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore, in order really to live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second to madness.Collection: Beautiful
For the man who thought he was Man there is no salvation.Collection: Men
Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.Collection: Police
You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.Collection: Cities
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.Collection: Cities
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.Collection: Distance
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.Collection: Flower
If a lover is wretched who invokes kisses of which he knows not the flavor, a thousand times more wretched is he who has had a taste of the flavor and then had it denied him.Collection: Kissing
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.Collection: Moments
The novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible.Collection: Illusion
At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.Collection: Mirrors
Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.Collection: Thinking
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a handCollection: Past
Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Jam
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.Collection: Mother
Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.Collection: Honesty
The soul is often in the surface, and the importance of 'depth' is overestimated.Collection: Design
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. . . .Collection: Zero
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.Collection: Silence
The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.Collection: Cities
The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.Collection: Sea
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.Collection: Memories
I had fallen in love. What I mean is: I had begun to recognize, to isolate the signs of one of those from the others, in fact I waited for these signs I had begun to recognize, I sought them, responded to those signs I awaited with other signs I made myself, or rather it was I who aroused them, these signs from her, which I answered with other signs of my own . . .Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Race
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.Collection: Believe
You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.Collection: Expression
Nobody looks at the moon in the afternoon, and this is the moment when it would most require our attention, since its existence is still in doubt.Collection: Moon
The people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping...something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draw arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment, and other characters come on to the scene.Collection: Running
To write well about the elegant world you have to know it and experience it to the depths of your being... what matters is not whether you love it or hate it, but only to be quite clear about your position regarding it.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Running
Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book.Collection: Book
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Reading