Italo Calvino Quotes - Page 2

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.

It is only after you have come to know the surface of things ... that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.

...Life is nothing but trading smells.

Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered.

The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears.

Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.

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.

Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.

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.

Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function.

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

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.

The soul is often in the surface, and the importance of 'depth' is overestimated.

Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.

The minute you start saying something, 'Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!' you are already close to view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore, in order really to live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second to madness.

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.

Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.

To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in a place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished.

Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities.

seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space

The novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible.

At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.

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.