Italo Calvino Quotes

في القراءة، خُذها عني، ينبغي أن تبقى غافلاً، وفي أقصى درجات التأهب معاً، كما لو أنني شارد الذهن لكني مرهف السمع

I set my hand to the art of writing early on. Publishing was easy for me, and I at once found favor and understanding. But it was a long time before I realized and convinced myself that this was anything but mere chance. Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb. Your first book already defines you, while you are really far from being defined. And this definition is something you may then carry with you for the rest of your life, trying to confirm it or extend or correct or deny it; but you can never eliminate it.

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.

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

the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he set sail, and the familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of home...

So our efforts led us to become those perfect objects of a sense whose nature nobody quite knew yet, and which later became perfect precisely through the perfection of its object, which was, in fact, us. I'm talking about sight, the eyes; only I had failed to foresee one thing: the eyes that finally opened to see us didn't belong to us but to others.

And in this self-expression I put all the thoughts I had about her, I released the anger she made me feel, my amorous way of thinking about her, my determination to exist for her, the desire for me to be me, and for her to be her, and the love for myself that I put in my love for her — all the things that could be said only in that conch shell wound into a spiral.

"The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow."

- from "The Adventure of a Photographer"

Now the situation is different, I admit: I have a wristwatch, I compare the angle of its hands with the angle of all the hands I see; I have an engagement book where the hours of my business appointments are marked down; I have a chequebook on whose stubs I add and subtract numbers. At Penn Station I get off the train, I take the subway, I stand and grasp the strap with one hand to keep my balance while I hold the newspaper up in the other, folded so I can glance over the figures of the stock market quotations: I play the game, in other words, the game of pretending there's an order in the dust, a regularity in the system, or an interpretation of different systems, incongruous but still measurable, so that every graininess of disorder coincides with the faceting of an order which promptly crumbles.

It can also be useful to politics, enabling that science to discover how much of it is no more than verbal construction, myth, literary tops. Politics, like literature, must above all know itself and distrust itself. As a final observation, I should like to add that it is impossible today for anyone to feel innocent, if in whatever we do or say we can discover a hidden motive - that of a white man, or a male, or the possessor of a certain income, or a member of a given economic system, or a sufferer from a certain neurosis - this should not induce in us either a universal sense of guilt or an attitude of universal accusation. When we become aware of our disease or of our hidden motives, we have already begun to get the better of them. What matters is the way in which we accept our motives and live through the ensuing crisis. This is the only chance we have of becoming different from the way we are - that is, the only way of starting to invent a new way of being.

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.

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.

Arrivando a ogni nuova città il viaggiatore ritrova un suo passato che non sapeva più d’avere: l’estraneità di ciò che non sei più o non possiedi più t’aspetta al varco nei luoghi estranei e non posseduti.Marco entra in una città; vede qualcuno in una piazza vivere una vita o un istante che potevano essere suoi; al posto di quell’uomo ora avrebbe potuto esserci lui se si fosse fermato nel tempo tanto tempo prima, oppure se tanto tempo prima a un crocevia invece di prendere una strada avesse preso quella opposta e dopo un lungo giro fosse venuto a trovarsi al posto di quell’uomo in quella piazza. Ormai, da quel suo passato vero o ipotetico, lui è escluso; non può fermarsi; deve proseguire fino a un’altra città dove lo aspetta un altro suo passato, o qualcosa che forse era stato un suo possibile futuro e ora è il presente di qualcun altro. I futuri non realizzati sono solo rami del passato: rami secchi.

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.

Tu casa, al ser el lugar donde lees, puede decirnos cuál es el lugar que los libros tienen en tu vida, si son una defensa que tú interpones para mantener alejado al mundo de fuera, un sueño en el que te hundes como en una droga, o bien si son puentes que lanzas hacia el exterior, hacia el mundo que te interesa tanto que quieres multiplicar y dilatar sus dimensiones a través de los libros.