Italo Calvino Quotes

Whether there is such a thing as Reality, of which the various levels are only partial aspects, or whether there are only levels, is something that literature cannot decide. Literature recognizes rather the *reality of the levels.*

A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.

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 roads, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indetations, scrolls.

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.

Ecco, pensò Amerigo, quei due, così come sono, sono reciprocamente necessari. E pensò: ecco, questo modo d'essere è l'amore. E poi: l'umano arriva dove arriva l'amore; non ha confini se non quelli che gli diamo.

In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies’ protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.

...Life is nothing but trading smells.

...And meanwhile the Galaxy ran through space and left behind those signs old and new and I still hadn't found mine.

Journeys to relive your past?' was the Khan's question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: 'Journeys to recover your future?'
And Marco's answer was: 'Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will
never have.

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

From mirror to mirror — this is what I happen to dream of — the totality of things, the whole, the entire universe, divine wisdom could concentrate their luminous rays into a single mirror. Or perhaps the knowledge of everything is buried in the soul, and a system of mirrors that would multiply my image would then reveal to me the soul of the universe, which is hidden in mine.

Memory really matters...only if it binds together the imprint of the past and the project of the future, if it enables us to act without forgetting what we wanted to do, to become without ceasing to be, and to be without ceasing to become.

هو يواصل المجئ الي هذا المقهي كل مساء ليراها, لينكأ الجرح القديم من جديد,
وهي تأتي الي هذا المقهي كل مساء, ربما عمّدا لتوجعه, أو لعلها تأمل في أن تصبح عادة الوجع عنده عادة شأن أي عادة أخري, أن تتخذ طعم العدّم الذي غطي فمها وحياتها لسنوات.

What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious.

That wish to enter into an elusive element which had urged Cosimo into the trees, was still working now inside him unsatisfied, making him long for a more intimate link, a relationship which would bind him to each leaf and twig and feather and flutter.