A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
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.
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.
What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?
The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.
One reads alone, even in another's presence.
Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?
Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.
Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.
You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.
The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.
Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.
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 will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.
Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.
Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.
…we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
The novels that attract me most... are those that create an illusion of transperancy around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel and perverse as possible.
There is no language without deceit.
It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.
One should be light like a bird and not like a feather.
Don't ask where the rest of this book is!" It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. "All books continue in the beyond...
Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand
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.
How well I would write if I were not here!
In politics, as in every other sphere of life, there are two important principles for a man of any sense: don't cherish too many illusions, and never stop believing that every little bit helps.
...Life is nothing but trading smells.
Every choice has its obverse, that is to say a renunciation, and so there is no difference between the act of choosing and the act of renouncing
The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, "I read, therefore it writes.
So you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity.
Fantasy is like jam. . . . You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing . . . out of which you can’t make anything.
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.
Time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.
If a lover is wretched who invokes kisses of which he knows not the flavor, a thousand times more wretched is he who has had a taste of the flavor and then had it denied him.
Reading is solitude.
The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind. […] Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.
A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.
At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.
Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space
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.
...And meanwhile the Galaxy ran through space and left behind those signs old and new and I still hadn't found mine.
Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.
It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible
You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before
Memory really matters...only if it enables us to become without ceasing to be, and to be without ceasing to become.
In general confusion youth recognizes itself and rejoices.
Maybe you have to become a mother to get to the real sense of everything. Or a prostitute.
When you're young, all evolution lies before you, every road is open to you, and at the same time you can enjoy the fact of being there on the rock, flat mollusk-pulp, damp and happy.
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.
The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.
We all have a secret wound which we are fighting to avenge.
Again I am torn between the necessity and the impossibility of answering.
I've been in love for five hundred million years…
The cemetery is the home of those who are not here, come in.
In the morning you wake from one bad dream and another begins.
The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.
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.
But in vain I set out to visit the city: forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her.
...eyes that, like those of children, look at an eternal present without forgiveness.
If the spark doesn't come, that's a pity; but we do not read the classics out of duty or respect, but only out of love.
I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses.
It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
Life, thought the naked man, was a hell, with rare moments recalling some ancient paradise.
L'aspetto in cui l'amplesso e la lettura s'assomigliano di più è che al loro interno s'aprono tempi e spazi diversi dal tempo e dallo spazio misurabili.
And when my spirit wants no stimulus or nourishment save music, I know it is to be sought in cemeteries: the musicians hide in the tombs; from grave to grave flute trills, harp chords answer one another.
From this arid sphere every discourse and every poem sets forth; and every journey through forests, battles, treasures, banquets, bedchambers, brings us back here, to the center of an empty horizon.
And Marco's answer was: 'Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.
Of course, the ideal position for reading is something you can never find.
Fantasy is a place where it rains.
When the olfactory alphabet, which made them so many words in a precious lexicon, is forgotten, perfumes will be left speechless, inarticulate, illegible.
Her friends' lips were red, their teeth white, and their tongues and gums were pink. Pink, too, were the tips of their breasts. Their eyes were aquamarine blue, cherry-black, hazel and maroon.
Your case gives me new hope," I said to him. "With me, more and more often I happen to pick up a novel that has just appeared and I find myself reading the same book I have read a hundred times.
... we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.
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.
You're the absolute protagonist of this book, very well; but do you believe that gives you the right to have carnal relations with all the female characters?
The dream of being invisible . . . When I find myself in an environment where I can enjoy the illusion of being invisible, I am really happy.
We'll make an army in the trees and bring the earth and the people on it to their senses.
The more time passed, the less happened. The more they felt something must happen, the more the bailiffs realized they had to do something but the less they understood what it was.
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.
No, memory is true as long as you do not set it, as long as it is not enclosed in a form.
The fact is that I find in the day's light, in this diffused, pale, almost shadowless luminosity, a darkness deeper than the night's.
If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.
A poor writer is one who names rather than represents.
