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Quotes About Communication

All places communicate instantly with all other places, a sense of isolation is felt only during the trip between one place and the other, that is, when you are in no place.
~ 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
It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the sparks that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances.
~ Italo Calvino
In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.
~ Italo Calvino
The proper use of language, for me personally, is one that enables us to approach things (present or absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present or absent) communicate without words.
~ Italo Calvino
Scrivere è sempre nascondere qualcosa in modo che venga poi scoperto.
~ Italo Calvino
It's all very well for me to tell myself there are no provincial cities any more and perhaps there never were any: all places communicate instantly with all other places, a sense of isolation is felt only during the trip between one place and the other, that is, when you are in no place.
~ Italo Calvino
Gridò, se si può dir che gridi chi parla senza emetter quasi suono ma con tutta la sua forza.
~ Italo Calvino
A poor writer is one who names rather than represents.
~ Italo Calvino
De una ciudad no disfrutas las siete o setenta y siete maravillas, sino la respuesta que da a una pregunta tuya
~ Italo Calvino
In short, what you are doing is very beautiful but grammatically it doesn't change a thing. At the moment when you most appear to be a united voi, a second person plural, you are two tu's, more separate and circumscribed than before.
~ Italo Calvino
Chi comanda al racconto non è la voce: è l'orecchio
~ Italo Calvino
Azt vallom tehát, hogy akkor használjuk helyesen a nyelvet, hogyha tapintatosan, figyelmesen és óvatosan közelítünk vele a (jelen lév? vagy hiányzó) dolgokhoz, tiszteletben tartva azt, amit a (jelen lév? vagy hiányzó) dolgok szavak nélkül is közölnek.
~ Italo Calvino
Writing consists no longer in narrating but in sayin that one is narrating, and what one says becomes identified with the very act of saying. The psychological person is replaced by a linguistic or even a grammatical person, defined solely by his place in the discourse.
~ Italo Calvino
Certo il costo da pagare è alto ma dobbiamo accettarlo: non poterci distinguere dai tanti segnali che passano per questa via, ognuno con un suo significato che resta nascosto e indecifrabile perché fuori di qui non c'è più nessuno capace di riceverci e d'intenderci.
~ Italo Calvino
I read, therefore it writes
~ Italo Calvino
there can exist no dictionary that will translate into words the burden of obscure allusions that lurks in these things
~ Italo Calvino
Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order and rhythm; or else someone's gaze, answer, gesture is enough; it is enough for someone to do something for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and for his pleasure to become the pleasure of others: at that moment, all spaces change, all heights, distances; the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline, transparent as a dragonfly.
~ Italo Calvino
Eu falo, falo - diz Marco -, mas quem me ouve retém somente as palavras que deseja. [...] Quem comanda a narração não é a voz: é o ouvido. (p. 129)
~ Italo Calvino
E combattendo, troveranno che le parole non hanno più significato.
~ Italo Calvino
Yalan, sözlerde de?il ?eylerdedir.
~ Italo Calvino
La mia fiducia nel futuro della letteratura consiste nel sapere che ci sono cose che solo la letteratura può dare coi suoi mezzi specifici.
~ Italo Calvino
My faith in the future of literature rests on the knowledge that there are things that only literature, with its particular capacities, can give us. I
~ Italo Calvino
I am becoming convinced that the world wants to tell me something, send me messages, signals, warnings.
~ Italo Calvino