Italo Calvino Best Quotes & Sayings

You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst. — 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

Memories images, once they are fixed in words, are erased. — Italo Calvino

It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible — Italo Calvino

A person, for example, reads in adulthood a book that is important for him, and it makes him say, "How could I have lived without reading it!" and also, "What a pity I did not read it in my youth!" Well, these statements do not have much meaning, especially the second, because after he has read that book, his life becomes the life of a person who has read that book, and it is of little importance whether he read it early or late, because now his life before that reading also assumes a form shaped by that reading. — Italo Calvino

Here in Turin you can write because past and future have greater prominence than the present, the force of past history and the anticipation of the future give a concreteness and sense to the discrete, ordered images of today. Turin is a city which entices the reader towards vigour, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way toward madness. — Italo Calvino

There is still one of which you never speak.'
Marco Polo bowed his head.
'Venice,' the Khan said.
Marco smiled. 'What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?'
The emperor did not turn a hair. 'And yet I have never heard you mention that name.'
And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice. — Italo Calvino

It is only when they have the photos before their eyes that they seem to take tangible possession of the day they spent, only then that the mountain stream, the movement of the child with his pail, the glint of sun on the wife's legs take on the irrevocability of what has been and can no longer be doubted. — Italo Calvino

It is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it. — Italo Calvino

They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. — Italo Calvino

To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in a place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished. — Italo Calvino

Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky. — Italo Calvino

If this is what you believe, you are wrong: Penthesilea — Italo Calvino

The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts. — Italo Calvino

For years I have been coming to this library, and I explore it volume by volume, shelf by shelf, but I could demonstrate to you that I have done nothing but continue the reading of a single book. — Italo Calvino

There is no better place to keep a secret than in an unfinished novel. — Italo Calvino

And I see the houses of the human race perched on the edge of the sea, shipwrecked in their false neighborliness. — Italo Calvino

The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them. — Italo Calvino

The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time. — Italo Calvino

The best novelist of my generation is an Italian living in Paris, still working and improving - Italo Calvino. — Gore Vidal

Man is simply the best chance we know of that matter has had of providing itself with information about itself. — Italo Calvino

Try to foresee now everything that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best. — Italo Calvino

He knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a camel from whose pack hang wineskins and bags of candies fruit, date wine, tobacco leaves, and already he sees himself as the head of a long caravan taking him away from the desert of the sea, toward oases of fresh water in the palm trees' jagged shade, toward palaces of thick, whitewashed walls, tiled courts where girls are dancing barefoot, moving their arms, half-hidden by their veils, half-revealed. — Italo Calvino

The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions. — Italo Calvino

Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead. . . . — Italo Calvino

I do not understand how you can associate abortion with an idea of hedonism or the good life. — Italo Calvino

What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library? — Italo Calvino

In museums I always enjoy stopping at the Saint Jeromes. — Italo Calvino

Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings ... if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough. — Italo Calvino

A gentleman, my Lord Father, is such whether he is on earth or on the treetops — Italo Calvino

We all have a secret wound which we are fighting to avenge. — Italo Calvino

I thought: "Perhaps Adelma is the city where you arrive dying and where each finds again the people he has known. This means I, too, am dead." And I also thought: "This means the beyond is not happy. — Italo Calvino

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. — Italo Calvino

The only books I recognize as mine are those I must still write. — Italo Calvino

I change my method and field of reference from book to book because I can never believe in the same thing two times running. — Italo Calvino

Her breast was young, the nipples rosy. Cosimo just grazed it with his lips, before Viola slid away over the branches as if she were flying, with him clambering after her, and that skirt of hers always in his face — 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

Amedeo loved thick tomes, and in tackling them he felt the physical pleasure of undertaking a great task. Weighing them in his hand, thick, closely printed, squat, he would consider with some apprehension the number of pages, the length of the chapters, then venture into them, a bit reluctant at the beginning, without any desire to perform the initial chore of remembering the names, catching the drift of the story; then he would entrust himself to it, running along the lines, crossing the grid of the uniform page, and beyond the leaden print the flame and fire of battle appeared, the cannonball that, whistling through the sky, fell at the feet of Prince Andrei, and the shop filled with engravings and statues where Frederic Moreau, his heart in his mouth, was to meet the Arnoux family. Beyond the surface of the page you entered a world where life was more alive than here on this side ... — Italo Calvino

Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind's phantasms. — Italo Calvino

I'm a Communist, fully convinced and dedicated to my cause. — Italo Calvino

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? — Italo Calvino

Or else you can say, like the camel driver who took me there: "I arrived here in my first youth, one morning, many people were hurrying along the streets toward the market, the women had fine teeth and looked you straight in the eye, three soldiers on a platform played the trumpet, and all around wheels turned and colored banners fluttered in the wind. Before then I had known only the desert and the caravan routes. In the years that followed, my eyes returned to contemplate the desert expanses and the caravan routes; but now I know this path is only one of the many that opened before me on that morning in Dorothea. — Italo Calvino