Quotes from Italo Calvino

Perinthia's astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations are wrong and their figures are unable to describe the heavens, or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters.

And when my spirit wants no stimulus or nourishment save music, I know it is to be sought in cemeteries: the musicians hide in the tombs; from grave to grave flute trills, harp chords answer one another.

We live in a country where causes are always seen but never effects.

Ma la città non dice il suo passato, lo contiene come le linee d'una mano, scritto negli spigoli delle vie, nelle griglie delle finestre, negli scorrimano delle scale,nelle antenne dei parafulmini,nelle aste delle bandiere, ogni segmento rigato a sua volta di graffi,seghettature,intagli,svirgole.

He was staring hard, not at his wife and me but at his daughter watching us. In his cold pupil, in the firm twist of his lips, was reflected Madame Miyagi's orgasm reflected in her daughter's gaze.

Tu casa, al ser el lugar donde lees, puede decirnos cuál es el lugar que los libros tienen en tu vida, si son una defensa que tú interpones para mantener alejado al mundo de fuera, un sueño en el que te hundes como en una droga, o bien si son puentes que lanzas hacia el exterior, hacia el mundo que te interesa tanto que quieres multiplicar y dilatar sus dimensiones a través de los libros.

eyes that, like those of children, look at an eternal present without forgiveness.

I felt in harmony with the disharmony of others, myself, and the world.

Cái làm cho s? làm tình và s? ??c gi?ng nhau nh?t là, ? c? hai s? ?y, th?i gian và không gian ??u m?, khác v?i th?i gian và không gian ?o l??ng ???c.

But in vain I set out to visit the city: forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her.

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.

The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph.

From this arid sphere every discourse and every poem sets forth; and every journey through forests, battles, treasures, banquets, bedchambers, brings us back here, to the center of an empty horizon.

A volte uno si crede incompleto ed è soltanto giovane.

When the olfactory alphabet, which made them so many words in a precious lexicon, is forgotten, perfumes will be left speechless, inarticulate, illegible.

These cities grew in approximately the same places as our cities do now, however different the shape of the continents was. There was even a New York that in some way resembled the New York familiar to all of you, but was much newer, or, rather, more awash with new products, new toothbrushes, a New York with its own Manhattan that stretched out dense with skyscrapers gleaming like the nylon bristles of a brand-new toothbrush.

Among your books, in this assortment that does not make up a library, a dead or dormant part can still be distinguished, which is the store of volumes put aside, books read and rarely reread, or books you have not and will not read but have still retained (and dusted), and then a living part, which is the books you are reading or plan to read or from which you have not yet detached yourself or books you enjoy handling, seeing around you.

The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.

Chi oserebbe condannarti alla perdita del tu, catastrofe non meno terribile della perdita dell'io?

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.

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.

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.

What remains uncertain, rather, is whether this gain in evidence and (we might as well say it) splendor is due to the slow retreat of the sky, which as it moves away, sinks deeper and deeper into darkness, or whether on the contrary, it is the moon that is coming forward, collecting the previously scattered light and depriving the sky of it, concentrating it all in the round mouth of its funnel.

And Marco's answer was: 'Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.