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Italo Calvino QUOTES

81 " As far as you are able to gather from hints scattered through these letters, Apocryphal Power, riven by internecine battles and eluding the control of its founder, Ermes Marana, has broken into two groups: a sect of enlightened followers of the Archangel of Light and a sect of nihilist followers of the Archon of Shadow. The former are convinced that among the false books flooding the world they can track down the few that bear a truth perhaps extrahuman or extraterrestrial. The latter believe that only counterfeiting, mystification, intentional falsehood can represent absolute value in a book, a truth not contaminated by the dominant pseudo truths. "

― Italo Calvino , If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

82 " ...And meanwhile the Galaxy ran through space and left behind those signs old and new and I still hadn't found mine. "

― Italo Calvino , Cosmicomics

83 " The difference between the true and the false is only a prejudice of ours. "

― Italo Calvino , If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

84 " With the smell of beer I try to get the smell of death off me. And only the smell of death will get the smell of beer off you, like all the drinkers whose graves I have to dig. "

― Italo Calvino , If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

85 " again I am torn between the necessity and the impossibility of answering. "

― Italo Calvino , If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

86 " Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours. or to the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx. "

― Italo Calvino , Invisible Cities

87 " As Raimbaut dragged a dead man along he thought, ‘Oh
corpse, I have come rushing here only to be dragged along by the
heels like you. What is this frenzy that drives me, this mania for
battle and for love, when seen from the place where your staring
eyes gaze and your flung-back head knocks over stones? It’s that
I think of, oh corpse, it’s that you make me think of: but does anything
change? Nothing. No other days exist but these of ours
before the tomb, both for us the living and for you the dead. May
it be granted me not to waste them, not to waste anything of what
I am, of what I could be: to do deeds helpful to the Frankish cause:
to embrace, to be embraced by, proud Bradamante. I hope you
spent your days no worse, oh corpse. Anyway to you the dice have already shown their numbers. For me they are still whirling in the
box. And I love my own disquiet, corpse, not your peace. "

― Italo Calvino

88 " I'm accustomed to thinking of literature as a search for knowledge; in order to move onto existential terrain I need to consider it in relation to anthropology, ethnology, and mythology. "

― Italo Calvino , Six Memos For The Next Millennium

89 " Man is simply the best chance we know of that matter has had of providing itself with information about itself. "

― Italo Calvino

90 " In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which are frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you...And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. "

― Italo Calvino , If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Italo Calvino QUOTES

91 " Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places. "

― Italo Calvino , Invisible Cities

92 " The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space. "

― Italo Calvino , Invisible Cities

93 " Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. "

― Italo Calvino , Invisible Cities

94 " What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library? "

― Italo Calvino , If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

95 " You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours. "

― Italo Calvino , Invisible Cities

96 " One reads alone, even in another's presence. "

― Italo Calvino , If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

97 " Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little. "

― Italo Calvino , Invisible Cities

98 " The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner. "

― Italo Calvino , The Uses of Literature

99 " ...the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping...something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draw arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment, and other characters come on to the scene... "

― Italo Calvino , Invisible Cities

100 " This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts bring with it consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it. . . . "

― Italo Calvino , If on a Winter's Night a Traveler