Quotes About Transformation

Rice is born in water and must die in wine.

I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.

I felt a kind of vertigo, as if I were merely plunging from one world to another, and in each I arrived shortly after the end of the world had taken place.

Memory really matters...only if it enables us to become without ceasing to be, and to be without ceasing to become.

The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.

Perhaps, for each of them, I also resembled someone who was dead. I had barely arrived at Adelma and I was already one of them, I had gone over to their side, absorbed in that kaleidescope of eyes, wrinkles, grimaces.

To write, for example, a crime that is horrible but which somehow 'resembles' the butterfly, which would be light and fine like the butterfly. I could also describe the butterfly, but bearing in mind the horrible scene of a crime, so that the butterfly would become something frightful.

before, we swam, and now we are swum.

the world was trying to change its old face and show its underbelly of earth and roots.

There: the white butterfly has crossed the whole valley, and from the reader's book has flown here, to light on the page I am writing.

Irene is a name for a city in the distance, and if you approach, it changes. For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene. — Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead.

A model is by definition that in which nothing has to be changed, that which works perfectly; whereas reality, as we see clearly, does not work and constantly falls to pieces; so we must force it, more or less roughly, to assume the form of the model.

Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes.

The process going on today is the triumph of discontinuity, divisibility, and combination over all that is flux, or a series of minute nuances following one upon the other.

Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continent.

An outsider was taking my place, was becoming me, my cage with the starlings would become his, the stereoscope, the real Uhlan helmet hanging from a nail, all my things that I couldn't take with me remained to him; or, rather, it was my relationship with things, places, people, that was becoming his, just as I was about to become him, to take his place among the things and people of his life.

Una poesia vive anche per il potere d'irradiare ipotesi divagazioni associazioni d'idee in territori lontani, o meglio di richiamare e agganciare a sé idee di varia provenienza, organizzandole in una mobile rete di riferimenti e rifrazioni, come attraverso un cristallo.

It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.

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.

Traveler's past changes according to the route he has followed

With the revolution, there are people who change so much they become unrecognizable, and other people who feel they are the same selves as before. It must be a sign that they were prepared in advance for the new times.

and I think of the end of the world which is approaching, or rather, which has been in progress for a long while.

Fu una batosta dura per me. Ma poi, che farci? Continuai la mia strada, in mezzo alle trasformazioni del mondo, anch'io trasformandomi. Ogni tanto, tra le tante forme degli esseri viventi, incontravo qualcuno che «era uno» più di quanto io non lo fossi: [...]. Tutti costoro avevano qualcosa, lo so, che li rendeva in qualche modo superiori a me, sublimi, e che rendeva me, in confronto a loro, mediocre. Eppure non mi sarei mai cambiato con nessuno di loro.