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Quotes About Existence

It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on by light; the hour in which one is least certain of the world's existence.
~ Italo Calvino
I've been in love for five hundred million years…
~ Italo Calvino
Whether there is such a thing as Reality, of which the various levels are only partial aspects, or whether there are only levels, is something that literature cannot decide. Literature recognizes rather the *reality of the levels.*
~ Italo Calvino
Ecco, pensò Amerigo, quei due, così come sono, sono reciprocamente necessari. E pensò: ecco, questo modo d'essere è l'amore. E poi: l'umano arriva dove arriva l'amore; non ha confini se non quelli che gli diamo.
~ Italo Calvino
time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.
~ Italo Calvino
Something must always remain that eludes us ... For power to have an object on which it can be exercised, a space in which to stretch out its arms ... As long as I know there exists in the world someone who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading's sake, I can convince myself that the world continues ... And every evening I, too, abandon myself to reading, like that distant unknown woman ....
~ Italo Calvino
Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave. You cand resume your flight whereever you like," they say to me, "but you will arive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the names of the airport changes.
~ Italo Calvino
Memory really matters...only if it enables us to become without ceasing to be, and to be without ceasing to become.
~ Italo Calvino
And in this self-expression I put all the thoughts I had about her, I released the anger she made me feel, my amorous way of thinking about her, my determination to exist for her, the desire for me to be me, and for her to be her, and the love for myself that I put in my love for her--all the things that could be said only in that conch shell wound into a spiral.
~ Italo Calvino
There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive. They are announcements or presages that concern me and the world at once: for my part, not only the external events of my existence but also what happens inside, in the depths of me; and for the world, not some particular event but the general way of being of all things.
~ Italo Calvino
Chi oserebbe condannarti alla perdita del tu, catastrofe non meno terribile della perdita dell'io?
~ Italo Calvino
Contemplating the stars he has become accustomed to considering himself an anonymous and incorporeal dot, almost forgetting that he exists; to deal now with human beings, he cannot help involving himself, and he no longer knows where his self is to be found.
~ Italo Calvino
As long as I know there exists in the world someone who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading's sake, I can convince myself that the world continues...And every evening I, too, abandon myself to reading, like that distant unknown woman...
~ Italo Calvino
?u aç?k ki, bugün s?ra d??? olmayan ki?ilerin dünyas?nda ya??yoruz, en basit bireysellikleri bile reddedilen ki?ilerin dünyas?nda, öyle ki, insanlar önceden belirlenmi? davran??lar?n soyut bir toplam?na dönü?mü? durumdalar. bugün sorun, insan?n benli?inin bir bölümünü yitirmesi de?il art?k, tümünü yitirmesi, hiç var olmamas?d?r.
~ Italo Calvino
we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.
~ Italo Calvino
Dalle tende a cono si levava il concerto dei pesanti respiri addormentati. Cosa fosse quel poter chiudere gli occhi, perdere coscienza di sé, affondare in un vuoto delle proprie ore, e poi svegliandosi ritrovarsi eguale a prima, a riannodare i fili della propria vita, Agilulfo non lo poteva sapere e la sua invidia per la facoltà di dormire propria delle persone esistenti era un'invidia vaga, come di qualcosa che non si sa nemmeno concepire.
~ Italo Calvino
Do you want to demonstrate that the living also have a wordless language, with which books cannot be written but which can only be lived, second by second, which cannot be recorded or remembered? First comes this wordless language of living bodies...then the words books are written with, and attempts to translate that first language are vain...
~ Italo Calvino
Reality, ugly or beautiful as it may be, is something I cannot change
~ Italo Calvino
The universe and the void: I'll return to these two terms, between which swings the aim of literature, and which often seem to mean the same thing.
~ Italo Calvino
For the man who thought he was Man there is no salvation.
~ Italo Calvino
Praise to be the stars that implode. A new freedom opens up within them: annulled from space, exonerated from time, existing at last, for themselves alone and no longer in relation to all the rest, perhaps only they can be sure they really exist.
~ Italo Calvino
If one starts to draw comparisons between what is and what is not, it is the poorer qualities of the former that strike you, the impurities, the flaws; in short, you can only really feel safe with nothingness.
~ Italo Calvino
The book should be the written counterpart of the unwritten world; its subject should be what does not exist and cannot exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists, in its own incompleteness.
~ Italo Calvino
Each second is a universe, the second I live is the second I live in
~ Italo Calvino