Quotes from Italo Calvino

Irene is a name for a city in the distance, and if you approach, it changes. For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene. — Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

A stone, a figure, a sign, a word reaching us isolated from its context is only that stone, figure, sign, or word: we can try to define them, to describe them as they are, and no more than that; whether, beside the face they show us, they also have a hidden face, is not for us to know. The refusal to comprehend more than what the stones show us is perhaps the only way to evince respect for their secret; trying to guess is a presumption, a betrayal of that true, lost meaning.

Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead.

From my words you will have reached the conclusion that the real Berenice is a temporal succession of different cities, alternately just and unjust. But what I wanted to warn you about is something else: all the future Berenices are already present in this instant, wrapped one within the other, confined, crammed, inextricable.

Gridò, se si può dir che gridi chi parla senza emetter quasi suono ma con tutta la sua forza.

Crecer en círculos concéntricos, como los troncos de los árboles que cada año aumentan una vuelta.

The lawn mower attends with defeaning shudder to the tonsure; a light odor of fresh hay intoxicates the air; the leveled grass finds again a bristling infancy; but the bite of the blades reveals unevenness, mangy clearings, yellow patches.

Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours. or to the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx.

As soon as I set foot there, everything I had imagined was forgotten; Pyrrha had become what is Pyrrha; and I thought I had always known

The past is like a tapeworm, constantly growing, which I carry curled up inside me, and it never loses its rings no matter how hard I try to empty my guts in every WC, English-style or Turkish, or in the slop jars of prison or the bedpans of hospitals or the latrines of camps, or simply in the bushes, taking a good look first to make sure no snake will pop out, like that time in Venezuela.

Each second is a universe, the second I live is the second I live in

Il libro dovrebb'essere la controparte scritta del mondo non scritto; la sua materia dovrebbe essere ciò che non c'è né potrà esserci se non quando sarà scritto, ma di cui ciò che c'è sente oscuramente il vuoto nella propria incompletezza.

And I see the houses of the human race perched on the edge of the sea, shipwrecked in their false neighborliness.

A poor writer is one who names rather than represents.

Aç?k konu?al?m: Her rejim, hatta en otoriter olan bile de?i?ken bir denge durumunda ayakta kalabilir, bu nedenle kendi bask? donan?m?n?n varl???n? sürekli olarak hakl? göstermesi gerekir ve bask? uygulayacak bir ?eylere gereksinme duyar.

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).

There is still, in fact, in Calvino's archive a drawer full of newspaper cuttings concerning scientific discoveries. As

Andria was built so artfully that its every street follows a planet's orbit, and the buildings and the places of community life repeat the order of the constellations and the position of the most luminous stars: Antares, Alpheratz, Capricorn, the Cepheids.

I say to myself that the result of the unnatural effort to which I subject myself, writing, must be the respiration of this reader, the operation of reading turned into a natural process, the current that brings the sentences to graze the filter of her attention, to stop for a moment before being absorbed by the circuits of her mind and disappearing, transformed into her interior ghosts, into what in her is most personal and incommunicable.

La ciudad no cuenta su pasado, lo contiene como las líneas de una mano, escrito en las esquinas de las calles, en las rejas de las ventanas

De una ciudad no disfrutas las siete o setenta y siete maravillas, sino la respuesta que da a una pregunta tuya

Raramente l'occhio si ferma su una cosa,ed è quando l'ha riconosciuta per il segno di un'altra cosa: un'impronta sulla sabbia indica il passaggio della tigre,un pantano annuncia una vena d'acqua,il fiore dell'ibisco la fine dell'inverno.

Renouncing things is less difficult than people believe: it's all a matter of getting started. Once you've succeeded in dispensing with something you thought essential, you realize you can also do without something else, then without many other things. So here I am walking along this empty surface that is the world.

In short, what you are doing is very beautiful but grammatically it doesn't change a thing. At the moment when you most appear to be a united voi, a second person plural, you are two tu's, more separate and circumscribed than before.