Italo Calvino Quotes

It is within you that the ghosts acquire voices.

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 universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

A person's life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that is not chronological but, rather, corresponds to an inner architecture.

It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.

A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.

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.

You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before

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

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

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.

You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie.

Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don't mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification.

Memories images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.

A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.

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

In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.

They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.

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

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.

There is no language without deceit.

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.