The Road to San Giovanni Quotes

“ذكرياتي عن الحياة خلال هذه السنوات تغيرت أيضاً والكثير من الأشياء التي ظننتها روتينية وتافهة أصبحت الآن مزدحمة بالمعاني، التوتر، الأحاسيس والهواجس.”
― Italo Calvino, The Road to San Giovanni

“كان عالم الأشياء أخرس بالنسبة لي. الكلمات التي تتدفق وتتدفق في رأسي لم تكن مرتكزة على موضوعات، بل على عواطف وخيالات وهواجس”
― Italo Calvino, The Road to San Giovanni

“بالنسبة لعقلية والدي كان يجب أن تكون الكلمات إثباتاً للأشياء، وإشارات للحياة، أمّا بالنسبة لي فكانت تذوقاً مبدئياً لأشياء بالكاد ملموحة، ومحتملة وغير ممسوكة.”
― Italo Calvino, The Road to San Giovanni

“كان حديث أحدنا مع الآخر صعباً، كلانا كان مسهباً بطبيعته، حائزاً على محيط من الكلمات، وفي حضرة أحدنا أمام الآخر كنا نصبح صامتين، ونسير بصمت جنباً إلى جنب”
― Italo Calvino, The Road to San Giovanni

“Hence that state of mind at once gloomy and euphoric which one associates with carrying out the rubbish; and the way we see the men who go by emptying the bins into their pulping truck not just as emissaries for the chthonic world, gravediggers of the inanimate, Charons of a beyond of greasy paper and rusty tin, but as angels too, as indispensable mediators between ourselves and the heaven of ideas in which we undeservedly soar (or imagine we soar) and which can exist only in so far as we are not overwhelmed by the waste which every act of living incessantly produces (even the act of thinking: these thoughts of mine that you are reading being all that been salvaged from the scores of sheets of paper now crumpled up in the bin), heralds of a possible salvation beyond the destruction inherent in all production and consumption, liberators from the weight of time’s detritus, ponderous dark angels of lightness and clarity.”
― Italo Calvino, The Road to San Giovanni

“For the brief span of our lifetimes, everything remains there on the screen, distressingly present; first images of eros and premonitions of death catch up with us in every dream; the end of the world began with us and shows no signs of ending; the film we thought we were merely watching is the story of our lives.”
― Italo Calvino, The Road to San Giovanni

“تغيرتُ أنا، السينما تغيرت، تغيّر جوهرها وتغيرت بعلاقتها معي. تستأنف سيرة ارتيادي للسينما، لكنها سيرة ذلك المرتاد الذي لم يعد مجرد مرتاداً فقط.”
― Italo Calvino, The Road to San Giovanni

“...our genteel lifestyle seemed guaranteed for all eternity by the availability of cheap labor.”
― Italo Calvino, The Road to San Giovanni

“I continue to gaze into the valley bottom of the memory. And my fear now is that as soon as a memory forms it immediately takes on the wrong light, mannered, sentimental as war and youth always are, becomes a piece of narrative written in the style of the time, which can't tell us how things really were but only how we thought we saw them, thought we said them. I don't know if I am destroying the past or saving it, the past hidden in that besieged village.”
― Italo Calvino, The Road to San Giovanni