Quotes from Italo Calvino

It just wasn't possible to make him accept a reality different from his own.

It seems impossible, in a big city like Paris, but you can waste hours looking for the right place to burn up a corpse.

Pensé: —Uno llega a un momento de la vida en que de la gente que ha conocido son mas los muertos que los vivos. Y la mente se niega a aceptar otras fisonomías, otras expresiones: en todas las caras nuevas que encuentra, imprime los viejos calcos, para cada una encuentra la máscara que más se adapta.

On sober reflection, you prefer it this way, confronting something and not quite knowing yet what it is.

Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller recognises the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.

Yo tenía la impresión de que mi hermano no sólo había enloquecido del todo, sino que se estaba volviendo algo imbécil, cosa más grave y dolorosa, porque la locura es una fuerza de la naturaleza, para bien o para mal, mientras que la bobería es una debilidad de la naturaleza, sin contrapartida.

Your reading is no longer solitary: you think of the Other Reader, who, at this same moment, is also opening the book; and there, the novel to be read is superimposed by a possible novel to be lived, the continuation of your story with her, or better still, the beginning of a possible story.

En la plaza está la pequeña pared de los viejos que miran pasar la juventud; el hombre está sentado en fila con ellos. Los deseos son ya recuerdos. (Ciudad Isadora)

The trouble is that once upon a time they all began like that, all novels. There was somebody who went along a lonely street and saw something that attracted his attention, something that seemed to conceal a mystery, or a premonition; then he asked for explanations and they told him a long story…

You know you are somewhat impulsive, but you have learned to control yourself. The thing that most exasperates you is to find yourself at the mercy of the fortuitous, the aleatory, the random, in things and in human actions - carelessness, approximation, imprecision, whether your own or others'. In such instances your dominant passion is the impatience to erase the disturbing effects of that arbitrariness or distraction, to re-establish the normal course of events.

Meanwhile, in the satisfaction you receive from her way of reading you, from the textual quotations of your physical objectivity, you begin to harbor a doubt: that she is not reading you, single and whole as you are, but using you, using fragments of you detached from the context to construct for herself a ghostly partner, known to her alone, in the penumbra of her semiconsciousness, and what she is deciphering is this apocryphal visitor, not you.

if you ask an inhabitant of Zenobia to describe his vision of a happy life, it is always a city like Zenobia that he imagines […], a Zenobia perhaps quite different, a-flutter with banners and ribbons, but always derived by combining elements of that first model.

He knows the conspirators are waiting for a sign from the Sultana to light the fuse, but she has given orders never to disturb her while she is reading, not even if the palace were about to blow up....

Reading means stripping yourself of every purpose, every foregone conclusion, to be ready to catch a voice that makes itself heard when you least expect it, a voice that comes from an unknown source, from somewhere beyond the book, beyond the author, beyond the conventions of writing: from the unsaid, from what the world has not yet said of itself and does not yet have the words to say

Try to foresee now everything that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best.

Um sentimento dominante não tarda a apresentar-se em seguida, impondo-se sobre todo e qualquer outro pensamento: e é o alívio por se saber que todos os problemas são problemas dos outros, que é tudo lá com eles. Aos mortos já não deveria interessar mais nada de nada, porque já não lhes diz respeito pensar em nada disso; e mesmo que isso possa parecer imoral, é nesta irresponsabilidade que os mortos encontram a sua alegria.

It is my image that I want to multiply, but not out of narcissism or megalomania, as could all too easily be believed: on the contrary, I want to conceal, in the midst of so many illusory ghosts of myself, the true me, who makes them move.

His memory, if he could patiently reconstruct the hours he passed, second by second, promised him boundless Edens.

Eu chegara ao limiar da adolescência e ainda me ocultava entre as raízes das grandes árvores do bosque para me contar histórias. Uma agulha de pinheiro podia representar para mim um cavaleiro ou uma dama ou um bufão; movimentava-a diante de meus olhos e me exaltava em relatos intermináveis. Depois ficava com vergonha dessas fantasias e fugia.

instead I find myself more and more outside; from one courtyard I move to another courtyard, as if in this palace all the doors served only for leaving and never for entering.

Are you depressed or euphoric? The house, in its wisdom, seems to have taken advantage of your moments of euphoria to prepare itself to shelter you in your moments of depression.

It was the love which the hunter has for living things, and which he can only express by aiming his gun at them ...

uno llega a un momento de la vida en que de la gente que ha conocido son mas los muertos que los vivos. Y la mente se niega aceptar otras fisonomías, otras expresiones: en todas las caras nuevas que encuentra, imprime los viejos calcos, para cada una encuentra la máscara que mas se adapta. ( Ciudad:Adelma)

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?