Six Memos for the Next Millennium Quotes

“I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“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, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“One should be light like a bird and not like a feather.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“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 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. (Terence sent me this quote the other day. A good battle cry, I believe... and one I wholeheartedly respect.)”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“For Leopardi, unhappy hedonist that he was, what is unknown is always more attractive than what is known; hope and imagination are the only consolations for the disappointments and sorrows of experience. Man therefore projects his desire into infinity and feels pleasure only when he is able to imagine that this pleasure has no end.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“what matters is not the enclosure of the work within a harmonious figure, but the centrifugal force produced by it -- a plurality of language as a guarantee of a truth that is not merely partial.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“Among Chuang-tzu's many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not begun. "I need another five years," said Chuang-tzu. The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen. [Calvino retells this Chinese story]”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“although science interests me just because of its efforts to escape from anthropomorphic knowledge, I am nonetheless convinced that our imagination cannot be anything but anthropomorphic.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“Esiste una leggerezza della pensosità, così come tutti sappiamo che esiste una leggerezza della frivolezza; anzi, la leggerezza pensosa può far apparire la frivolezza come pesante e opaca.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“La fantasia è un posto dove ci piove dentro.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“A child's pleasure in listening to stories lies partly in waiting for things he expects to be repeated: situations, phrases, formulas. Just as in poems and songs the rhymes help to create the rhythm, so in prose narrative there are events that rhyme.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“In fact the problem Leopardi is facing is speculative and metaphysical, a problem in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Descartes and Kant: the relationship between the idea of infinity as absolute space and absolute time, and our empirical knowledge of space and time.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“Who are we, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopaedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly reshuffled and reordered in every conceivable way.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“The universe and the void: I’ll return to these two terms, between which swings the aim of literature, and which often seem to mean the same thing.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“Think what it would be like to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to cement, to plastic.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“I think that my first impulse arises from a hypersensitivity or allergy. It seems to me that language is always used in a random, approximate, careless manner, and this distresses me unbearably. Please don't think that my reaction is the result of intolerance towards my neighbor: the worst discomfort of all comes from hearing myself speak. That's why I try to talk as little as possible. If I prefer writing, it is because I can revise each sentence until I reach the point where - if not exactly satisfied with my words - I am able at least to eliminate those reasons for dissatisfaction that I can put a finger on. Literature - and I mean the literature that matches up to those requirements - is the promised land in which language becomes what it really ought to be.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“Tutte le “realtà” e le “fantasie” possono prendere forma solo attraverso la scrittura, nella quale esteriorità e interiorità, mondo e io, esperienza e fantasia appaiono composte della stessa materia verbale; le visioni polimorfe degli occhi e dell’anima si trovano contenute in righe uniformi di caratteri minuscoli o maiuscoli, di punti, di virgole, di parentesi; pagine di segni allineati fitti fitti come granelli di sabbia rappresentano lo spettacolo variopinto del mondo in una superficie sempre uguale e sempre diversa, come le dune spinte dal vento del deserto.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“The clock is Shandy’s first symbol: under its influence, he is conceived and his misfortunes begin, which are the same thing according to this sign of time. Death is hidden in clocks, as Belli said, along with the unhappiness of individual life, of this fragment, of this thing that is divided, disintegrated, deprived of wholeness—death, which is time, the time of individuation, of separation, the abstract time that rolls toward its end. Tristram Shandy doesn’t want to be born because he doesn’t want to die. Any means, any weapon, can be used to save oneself from death and time. If a straight line is the shortest distance between two fatal, inescapable points, then digressions lengthen that line—and if these digressions become so complex, tangled, tortuous, and so rapid as to obscure their own tracks, then perhaps death won’t find us again, perhaps time will lose its way, perhaps we’ll be able to remain concealed in our ever-changing hiding places.   These”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“If I had to choose an auspicious sign for the approach of the new millennium, I would choose this: the sudden nimble leap of the poet/philosopher who lifts himself against the weight of the world, proving that its heaviness contains the secret of lightness, while what many believe to be the life force of the times—loud and aggressive, roaring and rumbling—belongs to the realm of death, like a graveyard of rusted automobiles.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“I'm accustomed to thinking of literature as a search for knowledge; in order to move onto existential terrain I need to consider it in relation to anthropology, ethnology, and mythology.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“The proper use of language, for me personally, is one that enables us to approach things (present or absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present or absent) communicate without words.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single homogeneous 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, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“The real protagonist of the story, however, is the magic ring, because it is the movements of the ring that determine those of the characters and because it is the ring that establishes the relationships between them. Around the magic object there forms a kind of force field that is in fact the territory of the story itself. We might say that the magic object is an outward and visible sign that reveals the connection between people or between events. . . We might even say that in a narrative any object is always magic.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“La letteratura vive solo se si pone degli obiettivi smisurati, anche al di là d’ogni possibilità di realizzazione. Solo se poeti e scrittori si proporranno impresse che nessun altro osa immaginare la letteratura continuerà ad avere una funzione. Da quando la scienza diffida dalle spiegazioni generali e dalle soluzioni che non siano settoriali e specialistiche, la grande sfida per la letteratura è saper tessere insieme i diversi saperi e i diversi codici in una visione plurima, sfaccettata del mondo.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the sparks that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

“Azt vallom tehát, hogy akkor használjuk helyesen a nyelvet, hogyha tapintatosan, figyelmesen és óvatosan közelítünk vele a (jelen lévő vagy hiányzó) dolgokhoz, tiszteletben tartva azt, amit a (jelen lévő vagy hiányzó) dolgok szavak nélkül is közölnek.”
― Italo Calvino, Amerikai előadások

“it’s that particular connection between melancholy and humor that Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl examined in Saturn and Melancholy (1964). Just as melancholy is sadness made light, so humor is comedy that has lost its physical weight (that dimension of human carnality that, however, makes Boccaccio and Rabelais great) and casts doubts on the self, the world, and the entire network of relations they form.”
― Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium