The Complete Cosmicomics Quotes

“You explode, if that's more to your taste, shoot yourself all around in endless darts, be prodigal, spendthrift, reckless: I shall implode, collapse inside the abyss of myself, towards my buried centre, infinitely.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“Now the situation is different, I admit: I have a wristwatch, I compare the angle of its hands with the angle of all the hands I see; I have an engagement book where the hours of my business appointments are marked down; I have a chequebook on whose stubs I add and subtract numbers. At Penn Station I get off the train, I take the subway, I stand and grasp the strap with one hand to keep my balance while I hold the newspaper up in the other, folded so I can glance over the figures of the stock market quotations: I play the game, in other words, the game of pretending there's an order in the dust, a regularity in the system, or an interpretation of different systems, incongruous but still measurable, so that every graininess of disorder coincides with the faceting of an order which promptly crumbles.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“Imagine I can see her, her or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand different vistas, she who makes the Moon and, whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“When you’ve waited two hundred million years, you can also wait six hundred;”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“... before, we swam, and now we are swum.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“my love now knew only the heart-rending nostalgia for what it lacked: a where, a surrounding, a before, an after.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“When you’ve waited two hundred million years, you can also wait six hundred; and I waited; the way was long but I wasn’t on foot, after all; astride the galaxy I travelled through the light-years, galloping over the planetary and stellar orbits as if I were on a horse whose shoes struck sparks; I was in a state of mounting excitement; I felt I was going forth to conquer the only thing that mattered to me, sign and dominion and name . . .”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“If one starts to draw comparisons between what is and what is not, it is the poorer qualities of the former that strike you, the impurities, the flaws; in short, you can only really feel safe with nothingness.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“Let me make one thing clear: this theory that the universe, after having reached an extremity of rarefaction, will be condensed again has never convinced me. And yet many of us are counting only on that, continually making plans for the time when we’ll all be back there again.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“This is why, rather than go on talking, I felt the need to transform the things to be said into a cone of light hurled at a hundred miles an hour, to transform myself into this cone of light moving over the superhighway, because it is certain that such a signal can be received and understood by her without being lost in the ambiguous disorder of secondary vibrations, just as I, to receive and understand the things she has to say to me, would like them to be only (rather, I would like her to be only) this cone of light I see advancing on the superhighway at a speed (I'm guessing, at a glance) of eighty or ninety. What counts is communicating the indispensable, skipping all the superfluous, reducing ourselves to essential communication, to a luminous signal that moves in a given direction, abolishing the complexity of our personalities and situations and facial expressions, leaving them in the shadowy container that the headlights carry behind them and conceal. The Y I love is really that moving band of luminous rays, and all the rest of her can remain implicit; and the me that she can love, the me that has the power of entering that circuit of exaltation which is her affective life, in the flashing of this pass which, through love of her and with a certain risk, I am now attempting.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“In the course of millions of years there was no form of living creature that hadn’t had its opportunity to come forth, populate the Earth, and then—in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred—decline and vanish.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“I might say I am in love with each of those girls and at the same time I am sure of being in love always with her alone.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“In other words, nobody really knew anything.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“But the memory of the old life that returned to my mind was the endless series of defeats, of flights, of dangers; to begin again meant perhaps only a temporary extension of that death agony, the return to a phase I thought had already ended.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“realized that with what seemed a casual jumble of words I had hit on an infinite reserve of new combinations among the signs which compact, opaque, uniform reality would use to disguise its monotony, and I realized that perhaps the race towards the future, the race I had been the first to foresee and desire, tended only—through time and space—towards a crumbling into alternatives like this, until it would dissolve in a geometry of invisible triangles and ricochets like the course of a football among the white lines of a field as I tried to imagine them, drawn at the bottom of the luminous vortex of the planetary system, deciphering the numbers marked on the chests and backs of the players at night, unrecognizable in the distance.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“in short, life would be maintained as it had gone on till then, in its achieved, perfect forms, without metamorphoses or additions with dubious outcome, and every individual would be able to develop his own nature, to arrive at the essence of himself and of all things.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“This prospect was in absolute contradiction to the optimism in which we children of the coast had been brought up, and I opposed the idea with shocked protests. But for me the true, living confutation of those arguments was Lll: in her I saw the perfect, definitive form, born from the conquest of the land that had emerged; she was the sum of the new boundless possibilities that had opened. How could my great-uncle try to deny the incarnate reality of Lll?”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“According to my great-uncle, the lands that had emerged were a limited phenomenon: they were going to disappear just as they had cropped up or, in any event, they would be subject to constant changes: volcanoes, glaciations, earthquakes, upheavals, changes of climate and of vegetation. And our life in the midst of all this would have to face constant transformations, in the course of which whole races would disappear, and the only survivors would be those who were prepared to change the bases of their existence so radically that the reasons why living was beautiful would be completely overwhelmed and forgotten.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“It just wasn’t possible to make him accept a reality different from his own.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“Soon space became filled again, and dense, like a vineyard just before vintage time, and we flew on, escaping from one another, my galaxy fleeing the younger ones as it had the older, and young and old fleeing us.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“Ayl was a happy inhabitant of the silence that reigns where all vibration is excluded; for her anything that looked likely to break the absolute visual neutrality was a harsh discord; beauty began for her only where the greyness had extinguished even the remotest desire to be anything other than grey.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“But the others also had wronged the Z’zus, to begin with, by calling them ‘immigrants’, on the pretext that, since the others had been there first, the Z’zus had come later. This was mere unfounded prejudice—that seems obvious to me—because neither before nor after existed, nor any place to immigrate from, but there were those who insisted that the concept of ‘immigrant’ could be understood in the abstract, outside of space and time.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“What are you doing?’ And he said: ‘I’m playing.’ ‘Playing? With what?’ ‘With a thing,’ he said. You understand? It was the first time. There had never been things to play with before. And how could we have played? With that pap of gaseous matter? Some fun: that sort of stuff was all right perhaps for my sister G’d(w)n. If Rwzfs was playing, it meant he had found something new: in fact, afterwards, exaggerating as usual, they said he had found a pebble.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“... the scent emanating from her skin not only because she was born with a glandular constitution suited to giving off that scent but also because of everything she has eaten in her life and the brands of soap she has used, in other words because of what is called, in quotes, culture, and also her way of walking and of sitting down which comes to her from the way she has moved among those who move in the cities and houses and streets where she's lived, all this but also the things she has in her memory, after having seen them perhaps just once and perhaps at the movies, and also the forgotten things which still remain recorded somewhere in the back of the neurons like all the psychic trauma a person has to swallow from infancy on.”
― Italo calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“I had seen much more than that, I had visited the world of the things that could have been, and I couldn't drive it from my mind. And I had known the beauty kept prisoner in the heart of that world, the beauty lost for me and for all of us, and I had fallen in love with it.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“There is still, in fact, in Calvino’s archive a drawer full of newspaper cuttings concerning scientific discoveries. As”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“We were peering into this darkness, crisscrossed with voices, when the change took place: the only real, great change I've ever happened to witness, and compared to it the rest is nothing”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“...she, Mrs. Ph(i)Nk₀, she who in the midst of our closed petty world had been capable of a generous impulse, 'Boys, the tagliatelle I would make for you!', a true outburst of general love, initiating at the same moment the concept of space and, properly speaking, space itself, and time, and universal gravitation, and the gravitating universe, making possible billions and billions of suns, and of planets, and fields of wheat, and Mrs. Ph(i)Nk₀s scattered through the continents of the planets, kneading with floury, oil-shiny, generous arms, and she lost at that very moment, and we, mourning her loss.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics

“If I love order, it's not the mark of a character subjected to an inner discipline, a repression of the instincts. In me the idea of an absolutely regular world, symmetrical and methodical, is associated with that first impulse and burgeoning of nature.
The rest of your images that associate passion with disorder, love with intemperate overflow - river fire whirlpool volcano - are for me memories of nothingness and listlessness and boredom.”
― Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics