Quotes from Italo Calvino

For Kundera, the weight of living is found in all types of restriction, in the dense network of public and private restrictions that ultimately envelops every life in ever-tighter bonds. His novel shows us how everything in life that we choose and value for its lightness quickly reveals its own unbearable heaviness. Perhaps

rivelandosi uno di quegli incerti impulsivi o impulsivi incerti che sembra sempre non sappiano cogliere il momento giusto e invece l'azzeccano ogni volta.

È dell'uomo attendere. Dell'uomo giusto, attendere con fiducia; dell'ingiusto, con paura.

The underwater depths were red like the colour we see now only inside our eyelids, and the Sun's rays penetrated to brighten them in flashes or else in sprays.

Kentliler sormu? olmal?: "Neden korkuyorsun, ruhumuzun ?eytan'?n eline geçmesinden mi?" "Hay?r, ona verecek ruhumuz olmamas?ndan.

On the day when I know all the emblems," he asked Marco, "shall I be able to possess my empire, at last?" And the Venetian answered: "Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an emblem among emblems.

Il mondo è così complicato, aggrovigliato e sovraccarico che per vederci un po' chiaro è necessario sfoltire, sfoltire.

Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves.

He cannot repress a strong feeling of envy for that man who expresses himself with such methodical self-confidence.

Le riflessioni che il negozio del macellaio ispira a chi vi entra con la borsa della spesa coinvolgono cognizioni tramandate per secoli in varie branche del sapere: la competenza delle carni e del tagli, il miglior modo di cuocere ogni pezzo, i riti che permettono di placare il rimorso per l'uccisione d'altre vite al fine di nutrire la propria.

Opening a path for yourself, with a sword's blade, in the barrier of pages becomes linked with the thought of how much the word contains and conceals: you cut your way through reading as if through a dense forest.

Perhaps nothing escapes this fate but the liveliness and nimbleness of the mind—the very qualities with which the novel is written, qualities that belong to a universe other than the one we live in.

By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else's present.

The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea.

His trouble was not madness, perhaps only desperation…

The world is so complicated, tangled, and overloaded that to see into it with any clarity you must prune and prune.

Insomma, c'erano anche da noi tutte le cause della Rivoluzione francese. Solo che non eravamo in Francia, e la Rivoluzione non ci fu. Viviamo in un Paese dove si verificano sempre le cause e non gli effetti.

Las ciudades son un conjunto de muchas cosas: memorias, deseos, signos de un lenguaje; son lugares de trueque, como explican todos los libros de historia de la economía, pero estos trueques no lo son sólo de mercancías, son también trueques de palabras, de deseos, de recuerdos.

When you're young, all evolution lies before you, every road is open to you, and at the same time you can enjoy the fact of being there on the rock, flat mollusc-pulp, damp and happy.

Your relationship with objects is selective, personal; only the things you feel yours become yours: it is a relationship with the physicality of things, not with an intellectual or affective idea that takes the place of seeing them and touching them.

For this woman," Arkadian Porphyrich continues, seeing how intently you are drinking in his words, "reading means stripping herself of every forgone conclusion, to be ready to catch 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.

the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there;

Ne resta una di cui non parli mai.» "Marco Polo chinò il capo. "«Venezia,» disse il Kan. "Marco sorrise. «E di che altro credevi che ti parlassi?» "L'imperatore non batté ciglio. «Eppure non ti ho mai sentito fare il suo nome.»

The folktale must be re-created each time. At the core of the narrative is the storyteller, a prominent figure in every village or hamlet, who has his or her own style and appeal. And it is through this individual that the timeless folktale is linked with the world of its listeners and with history.