Quotes from Italo Calvino

Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be....

Listening to someone read aloud is very different from reading in silence. When you read, you can stop or skip sentences: you are the one who sets the pace. When someone else is reading, it is difficult to make your attention coincide with the tempo of his reading: the voice goes either too fast or too slow.

Una poesia vive anche per il potere d'irradiare ipotesi divagazioni associazioni d'idee in territori lontani, o meglio di richiamare e agganciare a sé idee di varia provenienza, organizzandole in una mobile rete di riferimenti e rifrazioni, come attraverso un cristallo.

The living of Laudomia frequent the house of the unborn to interrogate them: footsteps echo beneath the hollow domes; the questions are asked in silence; and it is always about themselves that the living ask, not about those who are to come.

I look through the spaces between the iron steps at the colorless flow of the river down below, transporting chunks of ice like white clouds. In a distress that lasts an instant, I seem to be feeling what she feels: that every void continues in the void, every gap, even a short one opens another gap, every chasm empties into the infinite abyss.

You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.

Then Marco Polo spoke: "Your chessboard, sire, is inlaid with two woods: ebony and maple. The square on which your enlightened gaze is fixed was cut from the ring of a trunk that grew in a year of drought: you see how its fibers are arranged? Here a barely hinted knot can be made out: a bud tried to burgeon on a premature spring day, but the night's frost forced it to desist.

You see... War... For years now I've been dealing as best I can with a thing that in itself is appalling; war... and all this for ideals which I shall never, perhaps, be able to explain fully to myself..." "I too," replied Cosimo, "have lived many years for ideals which I would never be able to explain to myself; but I do something entirely good; I live on trees.

Pero 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, en los pasamanos de las escaleras, en las antenas de los pararrayos, en las astas de las banderas, cada segmento surcado a su vez por arañazos, muescas, incisiones, comas. Italo Calvino. Las ciudades invisibles (Zaira)

It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.

En adelante, de aquel pasado suyo verdadero o hipotético, él queda excluido; no puede detenerse; debe continuar hasta otra ciudad donde lo espera otro pasado suyo, o algo que quizás había sido un posible futuro y ahora es el presente de algún otro. Los futuros no realizados son sólo ramas del pasado: ramas secas.

Il mio nome è al termine del mio viaggio.

Of course, if I chose to be an optimist, there was always the possibility that, if our two parallels continued to infinity, the moment would come when they would touch.

Ayl was a happy inhabitant of the silence that reigns where all vibration is excluded; for her anything that looked likely to break the absolute visual neutrality was a harsh discord; beauty began for her only where the greyness had extinguished even the remotest desire to be anything other than grey.

La pagina ha il suo bene solo quando la volti e c'è la vita dietro che spinge e scompiglia tutti i fogli del libro. La penna corre spinta dallo stesso piacere che ti fa correre le strade. Il capitolo che attacchi e non sai ancora quale storia racconterà è come l'angolo che volterai uscendo dal convento e non sai se ti metterà faccia a faccia con un drago, uno stuolo barbaresco, un'isola incantata, un nuovo amore.

it's that particular connection between melancholy and humor that Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl examined in Saturn and Melancholy (1964). Just as melancholy is sadness made light, so humor is comedy that has lost its physical weight (that dimension of human carnality that, however, makes Boccaccio and Rabelais great) and casts doubts on the self, the world, and the entire network of relations they form.

If I had to choose an auspicious sign for the approach of the new millennium, I would choose this: the sudden nimble leap of the poet/philosopher who lifts himself against the weight of the world, proving that its heaviness contains the secret of lightness, while what many believe to be the life force of the times—loud and aggressive, roaring and rumbling—belongs to the realm of death, like a graveyard of rusted automobiles.

or else we contemplated the stars beyond the Moon, big as pieces of fruit, made of light, ripened on the curved branches of the sky, and everything exceeded my most luminous hopes ...

Em toda sua extensão, a cidade parece continuar a multiplicar o seu repertório de imagens: no entanto, não tem espessor, consiste somente de um lado de fora e de um avesso, como uma folha de papel, com uma figura aqui e outra ali, que não podem se separar nem se encarar

Há três hipóteses a respeito dos habitantes de Bauci: que odeiam a terra; que a respeitam a ponto de evitar qualquer contato; que a amam da forma que era antes de existirem e com binóculos e telescópios apontados para baixo não se cansam de examiná-la, folha por folha, pedra por pedra, formiga por formiga, contemplando fascinados a própria ausência.

It could be an important feature to be added to your portrait: your mind has interior walls that allow you to partition different times in which to stop or flow, to concentrate alternately on parallel channels.

If this is what you believe, you are wrong: Penthesilea

If I tell you that the city toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop.

The empire is being crushed by its own weight," Kublai thinks, and in his dreams now cities light as kites appear, pierced cities like laces, cities transparent as mosquito netting, cities like leaves' veins, cities lined like a hand's palm, filigree cities to be seen through their opaque and fictitious thickness.