Quotes from Italo Calvino

I can be sure that even in this tiny, insignificant episode there is implicit everything I have ever experienced, all the past, the multiple past I have tried in vain to leave behind me, the lives that in the end are soldered into an overall life, which continues even in this place from which I have decided I must not move…

Certainly from then on our mother changed; her earlier apprehension disappeared, and even if her fate as a mother was different from that of others, with a son so strange, lost to the usual life of the affections, she finally accepted Cosimo's strangeness before the rest of us, as if she were satisfied now by the greetings that from then on he sent her every so often, unpredictably --by that exchange of silent messages.

And at the bottom of each of those eyes I lived, or rather another me lived, one of the images of me, and it encountered the image of her, the most faithful image of her, in that beyond which opens, past the semiliquid sphere of the irises, in the darkness of the pupils, the mirrored hall of the retinas, in our true element which extends without shores, without boundaries.

Viajas para reviver o teu passado? - era agora a pergunta do Kan, que também podia ser formulada assim: - Viajas para achar o teu futuro? E a resposta de Marco: - O algures é um espelho em negativo. O viajante reconhece o pouco que é seu, descobrindo o muito que não teve nem terá.

I took this dialogue as a warning to be on guard: the world is falling apart and tries to lure me into its disintegration.

Literature is a search for the book hidden in the distance that alters the value and meaning of the known books; it is the pull toward the new apocryphal text still to be rediscovered or invented.

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

poor, frail universe, born of nothing, all we are and do resembles you.

one would say yes, if not every day, at least fairly regularly), whether only for yourself or also for others (often only for yourself, but with care, as if you were cooking also for others; and sometimes also for others, but nonchalantly, as if you were cooking only for yourself),

O certo é que os lixeiros são acolhidos como anjos e a sua tarefa de remover os restos da existência do dia anterior é circundada de um respeito silencioso, como um rito que inspira a devoção, ou talvez apenas porque, uma vez que as coisas são jogadas fora, ninguém mais quer pensar nelas.

Después de una larga evolución, ya entonces se podía decir que la Tierra había llegado al punto en que ahora estamos; o sea, había entrado en esa fase en que se desgastan más aprisa los automóviles que las suelas de los zapatos;

your purchases and gadgets suggest elaborate and fanciful recipes, at least in your intentions

If time has to end, it can be described, instant by instant," Palomar thinks, "and each instant, when described, expands so that its end can no longer be seen." He decides that he will set himself to describing every instant of his life, and until he has described them all he will no longer think of being dead. At that moment he dies.

Não há melhor lugar para se guardar um segredo que num romance inacabado.

makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it.

Ali nije samo to: u dnevnoj svjetlosti u tom difuznom blijedom sjaju bez sjena nalazim tamu još guš?u od no?ne.

I sit down at the desk, but no story I invent corresponds to what I would like to convey.

La città per chi passa senza entrarci è una, e un'altra per chi ne è preso e non ne esce; una è la città in cui s'arriva la prima volta, un'altra quella che si lascia per non tornare; ognuna merita un nome diverso.

Chi comanda alla racconto non è la voce: è l'orecchio.

I feel the jealousy of my books, which would like to be read the way she reads.

you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.

But he would continuously change them around, according to his studies and tastes of the moment, for he considered his books as rather like birds and it saddened him to see them caged or still.

La menzogna non è nel discorso, è nelle cose.

Would you like to be in his place, to establish that exclusive bond, that communion of inner rhythm that is achieved through a book's being read at the same time, by two people, as you thought possible with Ludmilla?