Quotes from Italo Calvino

I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts brings with it its consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it:

these are people used to seeing one another daily year after year; everything they say is the continuation of things already said.

Una volta acquisiti dalla tua persona, marcati dal tuo possesso gli oggetti non hanno più l'aria di essere lì per caso, assumono un significato come parti di un discorso, d'una memoria fatta di segnali e emblemi. Sei possessiva? [...] Sei possessiva verso te stessa, ti attacchi ai segni in cui identifichi qualcosa di te, temendo di perderti con loro.

Tutti abbiamo una ferita segreta per riscattare la quale combattiamo.

To write, for example, a crime that is horrible but which somehow 'resembles' the butterfly, which would be light and fine like the butterfly. I could also describe the butterfly, but bearing in mind the horrible scene of a crime, so that the butterfly would become something frightful.

All places communicate instantly with all other places, a sense of isolation is felt only during the trip between one place and the other, that is, when you are in no place.

before, we swam, and now we are swum.

To explode or to implode – said Qfwfq – that is the question: whether 'tis nobler in the mind to expand one's energies in space without restraint, or to crush them into a dense inner concentration.

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.

?u aç?k ki, bugün s?ra d??? olmayan ki?ilerin dünyas?nda ya??yoruz, en basit bireysellikleri bile reddedilen ki?ilerin dünyas?nda, öyle ki, insanlar önceden belirlenmi? davran??lar?n soyut bir toplam?na dönü?mü? durumdalar. bugün sorun, insan?n benli?inin bir bölümünü yitirmesi de?il art?k, tümünü yitirmesi, hiç var olmamas?d?r.

When you've waited two hundred million years, you can also wait six hundred;

Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.' Polo answers: 'Without stones there is no arch.

Those who arrive at Thekla can see little of the city, beyond the plank fences, the sackcloth screens, the scaffoldings, the metal armatures, the wooden catwalks hanging from ropes or supported by sawhorses, the ladders, the trestles. If you ask, "Why is Thekla's construction taking such a long time?" the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as they answer, "So that its destruction cannot begin.

This is what I wanted to hear from you: confess what you are smuggling: moods, states of grace, elegies!

we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.

Dalle tende a cono si levava il concerto dei pesanti respiri addormentati. Cosa fosse quel poter chiudere gli occhi, perdere coscienza di sé, affondare in un vuoto delle proprie ore, e poi svegliandosi ritrovarsi eguale a prima, a riannodare i fili della propria vita, Agilulfo non lo poteva sapere e la sua invidia per la facoltà di dormire propria delle persone esistenti era un'invidia vaga, come di qualcosa che non si sa nemmeno concepire.

All this is like a dream which the word bears within itself and which, passing through him who writes, is freed and frees him.

Finito il turno Arturo torna a casa, alle volte un po' dopo e alle volte un po' prima che suoni la sveglia della moglie, Elide. Lei, stirandosi con "una specie di dolcezza pigra", gli mette le braccia al collo, e dal suo giaccone capisce il tempo che fa fuori.

The facility of the entrance into another world is an illusion: you start writing in a rush, anticipating the happiness of a future reading, and the void yawns on the white page.

The moment that counts most for me is the one that precedes reading. At times a title is enough to kindle in me the desire for a book that perhaps does not exist.

Do you want to demonstrate that the living also have a wordless language, with which books cannot be written but which can only be lived, second by second, which cannot be recorded or remembered? First comes this wordless language of living bodies...then the words books are written with, and attempts to translate that first language are vain...

Se infelice è l'innamorato che invoca baci di cui non sa il sapore, mille volte più infelice è chi questo sapore gustò appena e poi gli fu negato.

The only books I recognize as mine are those I must still write.

??c là ni?m cô ??n.