Quotes from Italo Calvino

ma Pin non ha voglia di giocare e continua a camminare a perdifiato, con una tristezza che gli annuvola la gola.

A writer's work has to take account of many rhythms: Vulcan's and Mercury's, a message of urgency obtained by dint of patient and meticulous adjustments and an intuition so instantaneous that, when formulated, it acquires the finality of something that could never have been otherwise. But it is also the rhythm of time that passes with no other aim than to let feelings and thoughts settle down, mature, and shed all impatience or ephemeral contingency.

in his view, literature's worth lies in its power of mystification, in mystification it has its truth; therefore a fake, as the mystification of a mystification, is tantamount to a truth squared. He

To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in any place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and the when in which you vanished.

Azt vallom tehát, hogy akkor használjuk helyesen a nyelvet, hogyha tapintatosan, figyelmesen és óvatosan közelítünk vele a (jelen lév? vagy hiányzó) dolgokhoz, tiszteletben tartva azt, amit a (jelen lév? vagy hiányzó) dolgok szavak nélkül is közölnek.

But Ludmilla is always at least one step ahead of you. "I like to know that book exists that I will still be able to read…" she says, sure that existent objects, concrete albeit unknown, must correspond to the strength of her desire. How can you keep up with her, this woman who is always reading another book besides the one before her eyes, a book that does not yet exist, but which, since she wants it, cannot fail to exist?

What is more natural than that a solidarity, a complicity, a bond should be established between Reader and Reader, thanks to the book?

Agilulfo trascina un morto e pensa:"[...]E' vero che chi esiste ci mette sempre anche un qualcosa, una impronta particolare, che a me non riuscirà mai di dare. Ma se il loro segreto è qui, in questo succo di trippe, grazie, ne faccio a meno. Questa valle di corpi nudi che si disgregano non mi fa più ribrezzo del carnaio del genere umano vivente.

Writing consists no longer in narrating but in sayin that one is narrating, and what one says becomes identified with the very act of saying. The psychological person is replaced by a linguistic or even a grammatical person, defined solely by his place in the discourse.

Readers are my vampires.

Meanwhile, what do you do? How do you occupy this absence of yourself from the world and of the world from you? You read; you do not raise your eyes from the book between one airport and the other, because beyond the page there is the void, the anonymity of stopovers, of the metallic uterus that contains you and nourishes you, of the passing crowd always different and always the same.

The process going on today is the triumph of discontinuity, divisibility, and combination over all that is flux, or a series of minute nuances following one upon the other.

l'arte di scriver storie sta nel saper tirare fuori da quel nulla che si è capito della vita tutto il resto. ma finita la pagina si riprende la vita e ci s'accorge che quel che si sapeva è proprio un nulla.

Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind's phantasms.

I report to the revolutionaries infiltrated among the counterrevolutionary infiltrators.

Ogni vita è un enciclopedia, una biblioteca, un campionario di stili, dove tutto può essere continuamente rimescolato e riordinato in tutti i modi possibili

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?

But our mother, the most distant from him, perhaps, seemed the only one who could accept him as he was, maybe because she didn't try to find an explanation.

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.

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.

Forgive me if I have a kind of allergic reaction to all words that hint of nationalism...

The horses start tugging, one this way, one that; the wheels are drawn to such a divergence that they seem perpendicular to the road, a sign that the chariot has stopped. Or else, if it is moving, it might as well remain still, as happens to many people before whom the ramps of the most smooth and speedy roads open.

Apart from religious ceremonies, triduums, novenas, gardening, harvesting, vintaging, whippings, slavery, incest, fires, hangings, invasion, sacking, rape and pestilence, we have had no experience. What can a poor nun know of the world?

Will I ever be able to say, "Today it writes," just like "Today it rains," "Today it is windy"?