Calvino Invisible Cities Quotes & Sayings

The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the sixth Reich. The ground floor is full of gambling tables, like all the other casinos ... but the place is about four stories high, in the style of a circus tent, and all manner of strange County-Fair/Polish Carnival madness is going on up in this space. — Hunter S. Thompson

I would never do anything to hurt anybody, especially if they're helping me. I'm not that kind of person. — Billy Preston

Don't you wish we could pick the people we love?" "Yeah," I say. "Or just make the people we love want the same things we want. — Emily Giffin

After a seven days' march through woodland, the traveler directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders. On the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foilage.
There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence. — Italo Calvino

After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world. — Mary Oliver

In terms of the ego, most religions teach in some way that all of us must die before we die, and then we will not be afraid of dying. Suffering of some sort seems to be the only thing strong enough to destabilize our arrogance and our ignorance. I would define suffering very simply as whenever you are not in control. — Richard Rohr

I'm not middle-class; I do not have a degree. I am upper-class without money. — Leila Aboulela

The folks who lived before me have done so much for me that I want to show my gratitude by doing something for the folks who will live after me. — L.M. Montgomery

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 — Italo Calvino

... Marco's answers and objections took their place in a discourse already proceeding on its own, in the Great Khan's head. That is to say, between the two of them it did not matter whether questions and solutions were uttered aloud or whether each of the two went on pondering in silence. In fact, they were silent, their eyes half-closed, reclining on cushions, swaying in hammocks, smoking long amber pipes.
Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there ... — 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. — Italo Calvino

The cold war is over; Japan won. — Paul Tsongas

At times I feel your voice is reaching me from far away, while I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, when all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume. And I hear, from your voice, the invisible reasons which make cities live, through which perhaps, once dead, they will come to life again. — Italo Calvino

Clarice, the glorious city, has a tormented history. Several times it decayed, then burgeoned again, always keeping the first Clarice as an unparalleled model of every splendor, compared to which the city's present state can only cause more sighs at every fading of the stars. — Italo Calvino

Most people think they want more money than they really do, and they settle for a lot less than they could get — Earl Nightingale

Isn't it funny how far we will go to be with someone we think we love. A grown man will behave like a young boy, a young boy will do everything he can to appear like a grown man. We'll risk our reputations, sacrifice our worldly possessions, defy our parents, even our religious beliefs. We'll do illogical and foolish things, things that are impractical, wasteful, just for a moment of what we think is ecstasy on earth. — V.C. Andrews