A collection of quotes and thoughts by Italo Calvino on books, classics, literature, meaning, reading, words, humor, melancholy, love, dreams, night and sex.
95 Thought-Provoking Quotes By Italo Calvino That You Must Know
Italo Calvino was one of the best Italian fiction writers of the 20th century whose TRP rested in his whimsical and imaginative fables. A journalist, short story writer and novelist, Calvino’s best bet came with his the ‘Cosmicomics’ collection of short stories, the novels ‘Invisible Cities’ and ‘If on a winter's night a traveler’ and ‘Our Ancestors’ trilogy. Such was the popularity of Calvino’s work that he became one of the most translated contemporary Italian writers at the time of his death. A tough contender for ‘Nobel Prize in Literature’, Calvino achieved success not just in Italy but overseas as well, as his books were read by readers from Britain to Australia. Calvino’s style interestingly evolved over the period of his career. From fictional work, he switched to fantasy and allegory, producing stories that brought him international acclaim. In his works, Calvino played with the innovative structures and shifting viewpoints to examine the nature of chance, coincidence and change. His brilliance in the art of writing is also visible in the words of wisdom that he left behind which are till date quoted extensively. They cover various aspects of life and living, like politics, meaning of life, happiness, governance, family and so on, providing the food for thought. With this section, explore some of the famous quotes and thoughts by Italo Calvino.Â
Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
Italo Calvino
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.
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.
Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.
Italo Calvino
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.
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.
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...
Italo Calvino
Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Italo Calvino
Reading is solitude.
Italo Calvino
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.
Italo Calvino
At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.
Italo Calvino
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
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.
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.
Italo Calvino
The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.
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.
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.
Italo Calvino
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.
Italo Calvino
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.
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.
Italo Calvino
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.
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
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?
We'll make an army in the trees and bring the earth and the people on it to their senses.
Italo Calvino
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.
