Quotes from Italo Calvino

You are quick to catch the author's intentions and nothing escapes you

Perinthia's astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong and their figures are unable to describe the heavens, or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters.

Here is page 31 again, page 32 ... and then what comes next? Page 17 all over again, a third time! What kind of book did they sell you, anyway? They bound together all these copies of the same signature, not another page in the whole book is any good.

Some books will remain famous but will be considered anonymous works, as for us the epic of Gilgamesh; others author's names will still be known, but none of their works will survive, as was the case with Socrates; or perhaps, all the surviving books will be attributed to a single, mysterious author, like Homer.

They have known her since she was a girl, they know everything there is to know about her, some of them may have been involved with her, now water under the bridge, over and done with; in other words, there is a veil of other images that settles on her image and blurs it, a weight of memories that keep me from seeing her as a person seen for the first time, other people's memories suspended like the smoke under the lamps.

Tengo un librito, mucho más breve que los de Aristóteles y Ovidio, en el que están contenidas todas las ciencias y cualquiera puede, con poquísimo estudio, formarse de él una idea perfecta: es el alfabeto;

What line separates the inside from the outside, the rumble of wheels from the howl of wolves?

and she comes to this café every evening perhaps deliberately to make him suffer, or perhaps hoping that the habit of suffering will become for him a habit like any other, that it will take on the flavor of the nothingness that has coated her mouth and her life for years. "The

I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts brings with it its consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it.

If you ask, "Why is Thekla's construction taking such a long time?" the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as they answer, "So that its destruction cannot begin." And if asked whether they fear that, once the scaffoldings are removed, the city may begin to crumble and fall to pieces, they add hastily, in a whisper, "Not only the city.

The author was an invisible point from which the books came

marriage is the encounter of two egoisms that grind each other reciprocally and from which spread the cracks in the foundations of civilized society, the pillars of public welfare stand on the viper's eggshells of private barbarity.

You reason too much. Why in the world should love be reasoned?" "To love you you more. Everything increases its power if you do it by reasoning." "You live in the trees and you have the mentality of a lawyer with gout." "The boldest enterprises should be experienced with the simplest heart.

The generations stare at each other grimly, they speak only to misunderstand each other, to trade blame for growing up unhappy and dying disappointed.

where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third,

Questo è il significato della lotta, il significato vero, totale, al di là dei vari significati ufficiali. Una spinta di riscatto umano, elementare, anonimo, da tutte le nostre umiliazioni.

It is only when they have the photos before their eyes that they seem to take tangible possession of the day they spent, only then that the mountain stream, the movement of the child with his pail, the glint of the sun on the wife's legs, take on the irrevocability of what has been and can no longer be doubted. Everything else can drown in the unreliable shadow of memory.

Our subjective, individual selves, I was thinking, find their amplification and completion only in the unity of the couple.

Every animal, every object, every relationship took on beneficial or malign powers that came to be called magical powers but should, rather, have been called narrative powers, potentialities contained in the world, in its ability to link itself to other worlds on the plane of discourse.

Leer es ir al encuentro de algo que está a punto de ser y aún nadie sabe qué será.

Since I have become a slave of writing, the pleasure of reading has ended for me.

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

How can a dialogue be established between the two of you if each thinks he hears, not the words of the other, but his own words, repeated by the echo?

I say to myself that the result of the unnatural effort to which I subject myself, writing, must be the respiration of this reader, the operation of reading turned into a natural process, the current that brings the sentences to graze the filter of her attention, to stop for a moment before being absorbed by the circuits of her mind and disappearing, transformed into her interior ghosts, into what in her is most personal and incommunicable. At