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Six Memos For The Next Millennium QUOTES

Six Memos For The Next Millennium QUOTES

1 " what matters is not the enclosure of the work within a harmonious figure, but the centrifugal force produced by it -- a plurality of language as a guarantee of a truth that is not merely partial. "

― Italo Calvino , Six Memos For The Next Millennium

2 " I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses. "

― Italo Calvino , Six Memos For The Next Millennium

3 " In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language. "

― Italo Calvino , Six Memos For The Next Millennium

4 " I think that my first impulse arises from a hypersensitivity or allergy. It seems to me that language is always used in a random, approximate, careless manner, and this distresses me unbearably. Please don't think that my reaction is the result of intolerance towards my neighbor: the worst discomfort of all comes from hearing myself speak. That's why I try to talk as little as possible. If I prefer writing, it is because I can revise each sentence until I reach the point where - if not exactly satisfied with my words - I am able at least to eliminate those reasons for dissatisfaction that I can put a finger on. Literature - and I mean the literature that matches up to those requirements - is the promised land in which language becomes what it really ought to be. "

― Italo Calvino , Six Memos For The Next Millennium

5 " Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. "

― Italo Calvino , Six Memos For The Next Millennium

6 " It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the sparks that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances. "

― Italo Calvino , Six Memos For The Next Millennium

7 " The real protagonist of the story, however, is the magic ring, because it is the movements of the ring that determine those of the characters and because it is the ring that establishes the relationships between them. Around the magic object there forms a kind of force field that is in fact the territory of the story itself. We might say that the magic object is an outward and visible sign that reveals the connection between people or between events. . . We might even say that in a narrative any object is always magic. "

― Italo Calvino , Six Memos For The Next Millennium

8 " The proper use of language, for me personally, is one that enables us to approach things (present or absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present or absent) communicate without words. "

― Italo Calvino , Six Memos For The Next Millennium

9 " The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss. "

― Italo Calvino , Six Memos For The Next Millennium

10 " For Leopardi, unhappy hedonist that he was, what is unknown is always more attractive than what is known; hope and imagination are the only consolations for the disappointments and sorrows of experience. Man therefore projects his desire into infinity and feels pleasure only when he is able to imagine that this pleasure has no end. "

― Italo Calvino , Six Memos For The Next Millennium

11 " although science interests me just because of its efforts to escape from anthropomorphic knowledge, I am nonetheless convinced that our imagination cannot be anything but anthropomorphic. "

― Italo Calvino , Six Memos For The Next Millennium

12 " In fact the problem Leopardi is facing is speculative and metaphysical, a problem in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Descartes and Kant: the relationship between the idea of infinity as absolute space and absolute time, and our empirical knowledge of space and time. "

― Italo Calvino , Six Memos For The Next Millennium

13 " 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

14 " I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains. "

― Italo Calvino , Six Memos For The Next Millennium

15 " Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable. "

― Italo Calvino , Six Memos For The Next Millennium

16 " Think what it would be like to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to cement, to plastic. "

― Italo Calvino , Six Memos For The Next Millennium

17 " Among Chuang-tzu's many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not begun. "I need another five years," said Chuang-tzu. The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen. [Calvino retells this Chinese story] "

― Italo Calvino , Six Memos For The Next Millennium

18 " La mia operazione è stata il più delle volte una sottrazione di peso; ho cercato di togliere peso ora alle figure umane, ora ai corpi celesti, ora alle città; soprattutto ho cercato di togliere peso alla struttura del racconto e al linguaggio. "

― Italo Calvino , Six Memos For The Next Millennium

19 " Esiste una leggerezza della pensosità, così come tutti sappiamo che esiste una leggerezza della frivolezza; anzi, la leggerezza pensosa può far apparire la frivolezza come pesante e opaca. "

― Italo Calvino , Six Memos For The Next Millennium

20 " Sono convinto che scrivere prosa non dovrebbe essere diverso dallo scrivere poesia; in entrambi i casi è ricerca d’una espressione necessaria, unica, densa, concisa, memorabile. "

― Italo Calvino , Six Memos For The Next Millennium