The Nonexistent Knight & The Cloven Viscount Quotes

“It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on by light; the hour in which one is least certain of the world's existence.”
― Italo Calvino, The Nonexistent Knight & The Cloven Viscount

“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 & The Cloven Viscount

“That's the good thing about being halved. One understands the sorrow of every person and thing in the world at its own incompleteness. I was whole and did not understand, and moved about deaf and unfeeling amid the pain and sorrow all round us, in places where as a whole person one would least think to find it. It’s not only me . . . who am a split being, but you and everyone else too. Now I have a fellowship which I did not understand, did not know before, when whole, a fellowship with all the mutilated and incomplete things in the world.”
― Italo Calvino, The Nonexistent Knight & The Cloven Viscount

“How? Well, if a girl has had enough of every man who exists, her only remaining desire could be for a man who doesn't exist at all…”
― Italo Calvino, The Nonexistent Knight & The Cloven Viscount

“The art of writing tales consists in an ability to draw the rest of life from the little one has understood of it; but life begins again at the end of the page, and one realises that one has knew nothing whatsoever.”
― Italo Calvino, The Nonexistent Knight & The Cloven Viscount

“We'll invent new ways of being together.”
― Italo Calvino, The Nonexistent Knight & The Cloven Viscount

“This is how Raimbaut saw him, as with quick assured movements he arranged the pine cones in a triangle, then in squares on the sides of the triangle, and obstinately compared the pine cones on the shorter sides of the triangle with those of the square of the hypotenuse. Raimbaut realised that all this moved by ritual, convention, formulas, and beneath it there was ... what? He felt a vague sense of discomfort come over him at knowing himself to be outside all these rules of a game. But then his wanting to avenge his father's death, his ardor to fight, to enroll himself among Charlemagne's warriors—wasn't that also a ritual to prevent plunging into the void, like this raising and setting of pine cones by Sir Agilulf? Oppressed by the turmoil of such unexpected questions, young Raimbaut flung himself to the ground and burst into tears.”
― Italo Calvino, The Nonexistent Knight & The Cloven Viscount

“At that hour of dawn Agilulf always needed to apply himself to some precise exercise: counting objects, arranging them in geometric patterns, resolving problems of arithmetic. It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on by light; the hour in which one is least certain of the world's existence. He, Agilulf, always needed to feel himself facing things as if they were a massive wall against which he could pit the tension of his will, for only in this way did he manage to keep a sure consciousness of himself. But if the world around was instead melting into the vague and ambiguous, he would feel himself drowning in that morbid half light, incapable of allowing any clear thought or decision to flower in that void. In such moments he felt sick, faint; sometimes only at the cost of extreme effort did he feel himself able to avoid melting away completely. It was then he began to count: trees, leaves, stones, laces, pine cones, anything in front of him. Or he put them in rows and arranged them in squares and pyramids. Applying himself to this exact occupation helped him overcome his malaise, absorb his discontent and disquiet, reacquire his usual lucidity and composure.”
― Italo Calvino, The Nonexistent Knight & The Cloven Viscount

“As Raimbaud dragged a dead man along he thought, 'Oh corpse, I have come rushing here only to be dragged along by the heels like you. What is this frenzy that drives me, this mania for battle and for love, when seen from the place where your staring eyes gaze and your flung-back head knocks over stones? It's that I think of, oh corpse, it's that you make me think of: but does anything change? Nothing. No other days exist but these of ours before the tomb, both for us the waste them, not to waste anything of what I am, of what I could be: to do deeds helpful to the Frankish cause: to embrace, to be embraced by, proud Bradamante. I hope you spent your days no worse, oh corpse. Anyway to you the dice have already shown their numbers. For me they are still whirling in the box. And I love my own disquiet, corpse, not your peace.”
― Italo Calvino, The Nonexistent Knight & The Cloven Viscount

“آخ که چه سعادتی بود بستن چشم‌ها، هرگونه احساسی را دربارۀ خود از دست دادن، در مغاک ژرفِ خواب فرو رفتن و سپس هنگام بیدار شدن، دوباره خود را آمادۀ از نو بافتن رشته‌های هستی خویش یافتن.”
― Italo Calvino, The Nonexistent Knight & The Cloven Viscount

“,There is never a moonlight night but wicked ideas in evil souls writhe like serpents in nests, and charitable ones sprout lilies of renunciation and dedication.”
― Italo Calvino, The Nonexistent Knight & The Cloven Viscount