quotes by Italo Calvino

"In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which are frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you...And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. "
— Italo Calvino (If on a Winter's Night a Traveler)

"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."
— Italo Calvino

"A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say."
— Italo Calvino

"Falsehood is never in words; it is in things."
— Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities)

"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler."
— Italo Calvino (If on a Winter's Night a Traveler)

"“The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.”"
— Italo Calvino

"Erst wenn man die Oberfläche der Dinge kennen gelernt hat, kann man sich aufmachen, um herauszufinden, was darunter sein mag. Doch die Oberfläche der Dinge ist unerschöpflich."
— Italo Calvino

"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 (Invisible Cities)

"My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. 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. . . . Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world--qualities that stick to the writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them. "
— Italo Calvino

"It's all very well for me to tell myself there are no provincial cities any more and perhaps there never were any: all places communicate instantly with all other places, a sense of isolation is felt only during the trip between one place and the other, that is, when you are in no place. I, in fact, recognize myself here without a here or an elsewhere, recognized as an outsider by the nonoutsiders at least as clearly as I recognize the nonoutsiders and envy them. "
— Italo Calvino

"In the midst of a thick forest, there was a castle that gave shelter to all travelers overtaken by night on their journey: lords and ladies, royalty and their retinue, humble wayfarers."
— Italo Calvino (The Castle of Crossed Destinies)

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

"...and every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady's perfume in his jailbird's suit. And I'm left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells."
— 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. . . ."
— Italo Calvino (If on a Winter's Night a Traveler)

"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

"Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say."
— Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities)

"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

"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."
— Italo Calvino (The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount)

"The book I'm looking for,' says the blurred figure, who holds out a volume similar to yours, 'is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world.'"
— Italo Calvino (If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (Everyman's Library (Cloth)))

"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 of from their common story. "
— Italo Calvino (If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (Everyman's Library (Cloth)))