The Baron in the Trees Quotes

“Si conobbero. Lui conobbe lei e se stesso, perché in verità non s'era mai saputo. E lei conobbe lui e se stessa, perché pur essendosi saputa sempre, mai s'era potuta riconoscere così.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“So began their love, the boy happy and amazed, she happy and not surprised at all (nothing happens by chance to girls). It was the love so long awaited by Cosimo and which had now inexplicably arrived, and so lovely that he could not imagine how he had even thought it lovely before. And the thing newest to him was that it was so simple, and the boy at that moment thought it must be like that always.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“Why d’you make me suffer?"
“Because I love you.”
Now it was his turn to get angry. “No, no, you don’t love me! People in love want happiness, not pain!”
“People in love want only love, even at the cost of pain.”
“Then you’re making people suffer on purpose.”
“Yes, to see if you love me.”
The Baron’s philosophy would not go any further. “Pain is a negative state of the soul.”
“Love is all.”
“Pain should always be fought against.”
“Love refuses nothing.”
“Some things I’ll never admit.”
“Oh yes, you do, now, for you love me and you suffer.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“That wish to enter into an elusive element which had urged Cosimo into the trees, was still working now inside him unsatisfied, making him long for a more intimate link, a relationship which would bind him to each leaf and twig and feather and flutter.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“There is the moment when the silence of the countryside gathers in the ear and breaks into a myriad of sounds:a croaking and squeaking, a swift rustle in the grass, a plop in the water, a pattering on earth and pebbles, and high above all, the call of the cicada, The sounds follow one another, and the ear eventually discerns more and more of them -just as fingers unwinding a ball of wool feel each fiber interwoven with progressively thinner and less palpable threads, The frogs continue croaking in the background without changing the flow of sounds, just as light does not vary from the continues winking of stars, But at every rise or fall of the wind every sound changes and is renewed. All that remains in the inner recess of the ear is a vague murmur: the sea.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“Ombrosa non c’è più. Guardando il cielo sgombro, mi domando se è davvero esistita. Quel frastaglio di rami e foglie, biforcazioni, lobi, spiumii, minuto e senza fine, e il cielo a sprazzi irregolari e ritagli, forse c’era solo perché ci passasse mio fratello con suo leggero passo di codibugnolo, era un ricamo fatto di nulla che assomiglia a questo filo d’inchiostro, come l’ho lasciato correre per pagine e pagine, zeppo di cancellature, di rimandi, di sgorbi nervosi, di macchie, di lacune, che a momenti si sgrana in grossi acini chiari, a momenti si infittisce in segni minuscoli come semi puntiformi, ora si ritorce su se stesso, ora si biforca, ora collega grumi di frasi con contorni di foglie o di nuvole, e poi si intoppa, e poi ripiglia a attorcigliarsi, e corre e corre e si sdipana e avvolge un ultimo grappolo insensato di parole idee sogni ed è finito.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“We'll make an army in the trees and bring the earth and the people on it to their senses.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“That mesh of leaves and twigs of fork and froth, minute and endless, with the sky glimpsed only in sudden specks and splinters, perhaps it was only there so that my brother could pass through it with his tomtit’s thread, was embroidered on nothing, like this thread of ink which I have let run on for page after page, swarming with cancellations, corrections, doodles, blots and gaps, bursting at times into clear big berries, coagulating at others into piles of tiny starry seeds, then twisting away, forking off, surrounding buds of phrases with frameworks of leaves and clouds, then interweaving again, and so running on and on and on until it splutters and bursts into a last senseless cluster of words, ideas, dreams, and so ends.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“His trees were now hung all over with scrawled pieces of paper and bits of cardboard with maxims from Seneca and Shaftesbury, and with various objects; clusters of feathers, church candles, crowns of leaves, women's corsets, pistols, scales, tied to each other in certain order. The Ombrosians used to spend hours trying to guess what those symbols meant: nobles, Pope, virtue, war? I think some of them had no meaning at all but just served to jog his memory and make him realize that even the most uncommon ideas could be right.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“We live in a country where causes are always seen but never effects.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“Now that he is no longer here I should be interested in so many things: philosophy, politics, history. I follow the news, read books, but they befuddle me. What he meant to say is not there, for he understood something else, something that was all-embracing, and he could not say it in words but only by living as he did.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“The more time passed, the less happened. The more they felt something must happen, the more the bailiffs realized they had to do something but the less they understood what it was.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“Il bassotto alzò il muso verso di lui, con lo sguardo dei cani quando non capiscono e non sanno che possono aver ragione a non capire.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“Le imprese più ardite vanno vissute con l'animo più semplice. (Cosimo Piovasco Barone di Rondò)”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“There can be no love if one does not remain oneself with all one’s strength.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“Non ci può essere amore se non si è se stessi con tutte le proprie forze.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“This he understood: that association makes people stronger and brings out each person's best gifts, and gives a joy which is rarely to be had by keeping to oneself, the joy of realizing how many honest decent capable people there are for whom it is worth giving one's best (while living just for oneself very often the opposite happens, of seeing people's other side, the side which makes one keep one's hand always on the hilt of one's sword).”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“Cosimo sat in the ash tree every day, gazing at the meadow as if he could read in it something that had long been consuming him inside: the very idea of distance, of the gap that can't be bridged, of the wait that can last longer than life.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“A gentleman, my Lord Father, is such whether he is on earth or on the treetops”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“...his life was dominating by conflicting ideas, as often happens in periods of transition. The turbulence of the times makes some people feel a need to bestir themselves, but in the opposite direction, backwards rather than forwards;”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“In the Ondariva gardens the branches spread out like the tentacles of extraordinary animals, and the plants on the ground opened up stars of fretted leaves like the green skins of reptiles, and waved feathery yellow bamboos with a rustle like paper.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“That ornamentation of branches and leaves, forks, lobes, feathers, minute and without end, and the sky appearing only in irregular flashes and cutouts, maybe existed only because my brother passed there with the light step of a long-tailed tit, was an embroidery, made on nothing, that resembles this thread of ink, as I’ve let it run for pages and pages, full of erasures, of references, of nervous blots, of stains, of gaps, that at times crumbles into large pale grains, at times thickens into tiny marks resembling dotlike seeds, now twists on itself, now forks, now links knots of sentences with edges of leaves or clouds, and then stumbles, and then resumes twisting, and runs and runs and unrolls and wraps a last senseless cluster of words ideas dreams and is finished.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“You see... War... For years now I've been dealing as best I can with a thing that in itself is appalling; war... and all this for ideals which I shall never, perhaps, be able to explain fully to myself..."
"I too," replied Cosimo, "have lived many years for ideals which I would never be able to explain to myself; but I do something entirely good; I live on trees.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“Undertakings based on an inner tenacity have to be mute and obscure; one has only to declare or glory in them and it all appears silly, without meaning, even petty.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron In The Trees

“. . . anyone who wants to see the earth properly must keep himself at a necessary distance from it”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“Chi vuole guardare bene la terra deve tenersi alla distanza necessaria.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“Cosimo did not yet know love, and what is any experience without that? What point is there in risking life, when the real flavor of life is as yet unknown?”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“Her breast was young, the nipples rosy. Cosimo just grazed it with his lips, before Viola slid away over the branches as if she were flying, with him clambering after her, and that skirt of hers always in his face”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

“As a matter of fact, we had already been warned against sliding down the marble banisters, not out of fear that we might break a leg or an arm, for that never worried our parents-which was, I think, why we never broke anything-but because they feared that since we were growing up and gaining weight, we might knock over the busts of ancestors placed by our father on the banisters at the turn of every flight of stairs. Cosimo had, in fact, once brought down a bishop, a great-great-great-grandfather, miter and all; lie was punished, and since then he had learned to brake just before reaching the turn of a flight and jump off within a hair's-breadth of running into a bust.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees