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Quotes About Imagination

A pause. Then Ludmilla's voice resumes slowly as if she were trying to express something not easily defined. "Yes, it is. I like it very much… Still, I wish the things I read weren't all present, so solid you can touch them; I would like to feel a presence around them, something else, you don't quite know what, the sign of some unknown thing…
~ Italo Calvino
It's not for reading. It's for making. I make things with books. I make objects. Yes, artworks: statues, pictures, whatever you want to call them. I even had a show. I fix the books with mastic, and they stay as they were. Shut, or open, or else I give them forms, I carve them, I make holes in them. A book is a good material to work with; you can make all sorts of things with it.
~ Italo Calvino
A mesének nem a hang parancsol, hanem a fül.
~ Italo Calvino
Para guardar sus libros, Cosimo construyo en varias ecuaciones una especie de bibliotecas colgantes, defendidas de la mejor manera posible de la lluvia y de los roedores, pero las cambiaba continuamente de sitio, según los estudios y los gustos del momento, porque consideraba los libros un poco como los pájaros y no quería verlos quietos o enjaulados, decía que se entristecían.
~ Italo Calvino
Are you reading or daydreaming?
~ Italo Calvino
La poesia è capace di "far entrare il mare in un bicchiere
~ Italo Calvino
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.
~ Italo Calvino
His memory, if he could patiently reconstruct the hours he had passed, second by second, promised him boundless Edens.
~ Italo Calvino
your purchases and gadgets suggest elaborate and fanciful recipes, at least in your intentions
~ Italo Calvino
I sit down at the desk, but no story I invent corresponds to what I would like to convey.
~ Italo Calvino
Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have function." — Italo Calvino
~ Italo Calvino
When the human realm seems doomed to heaviness, I feel the need to fly like Perseus into some other space. I am not talking about escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I feel the need to change my approach, to look at the world from a different angle, with different logic, different methods of knowing and proving. The images of lightness I'm looking for shouldn't let themselves dissolve as dreams do in the reality of the present and future . .
~ Italo Calvino
Al ver a veces a mi hermano perderse en un viejo nogal inmenso, como en un palacio de muchos pisos e innumerables estancias, me entraban ganas de imitarlo, de ir a vivir allá arriba; tal es la fuerza y la seguridad que ese árbol pone en ser árbol, su obstinación en ser pesado y duro, que se le nota incluso en sus hojas.
~ Italo Calvino
as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading's sake, I can convince myself that the world continues....
~ Italo Calvino
You try to picture how the world might appear, this world dense with writing that surrounds us on all sides, to someone who has learned not to read.
~ Italo Calvino
Dal raccontare al passato, e dal presente che m prendeva la mono nei tratti concitati, ecco, o futuro, sono salita in sella al tuo cavallo. Quali nuovi stendardi mi levi incontro dai pennoni delle torri di città non ancora fondate? quali fumi di devastazioni dai castelli e dai giardini che amavo? quali impreviste età dell'oro prepari, tu malpadroneggiato, tu foriero di tesori pagati a caro prezzo, tu mio regno da conquistare, futuro...
~ Italo Calvino
Your reading is no longer solitary; you think of the Other Reader, who at this same moment, is also opening the book.
~ Italo Calvino
This – some say – confirms the hypothesis that each man bears in his mind a city made only of differences, a city without figures and without form, and the individual cities fill it up.
~ Italo Calvino
I like to know that books exist that I will still be able to read…" she says, sure that existent objects, concrete albeit unknown, must correspond to the strength of her desire. How can you keep up with her, this woman who is always reading another book besides the one before her eyes, a book that does not yet exist, but which, since she wants it, cannot fail to exist ?
~ Italo Calvino
Tenere i piedi sollevati è la prima condizione per godere della lettura.
~ Italo Calvino
Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò-Lived in trees-Always loved earth--Went into sky.
~ Italo Calvino
He covers his eyes, as if pursued by the sight of billions of pages, lines, words, whirling in a dust storm.
~ Italo Calvino
Minha confiança no futuro da literatura consiste em saber que há coisas que só a literatura com seus meios específicos nos pode dar.
~ Italo Calvino
Sire, désormais je t'ai parlé de toutes les villes que je connais. — Il en reste une dont tu ne parles jamais. Marco Polo baissa la tête. — Venise, dit le Khan. Marco sourit. — Chaque fois que je fais la description d'une ville, je dis quelque chose de Venise. — Quand je t'interroge sur d'autres villes, je veux t'entendre parler d'elles. Et de Venise, quand je t'interroge sur Venise.
~ Italo Calvino