I speak and speak,” Marco says, “but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. The description of the world to which you lend a benevolent… - Italo Calvino

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I speak and speak,” Marco says, “but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. The description of the world to which you lend a benevolent ear is one thing; the description that will go the rounds of the groups of stevedores and gondoliers on the street outside my house the day of my return is another; and yet another, that which I might dictate late in life, if I were taken prisoner by Genoese pirates and put in irons in the same cell with a writer of adventure stories. It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.

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About Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino (October 15, 1923 – September 19, 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. Lionized in Britain and America, he was, at the time of his death, the most-translated contemporary Italian writer.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Italo Giovanni Calvino Italo Giovanni Calvino Mameli

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Additional quotes by Italo Calvino

Grown-ups are an untrustworthy, treacherous lot, they don't take their games in the serious wholehearted way children do, and yet they too have their own games, one more serious than the other, one game inside another, so that it's impossible to discover what the real one is.

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.

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To explode or to implode - said Qwfwq - that is the question: whether 'tis nobler in the mind to expand one's energies in space without restraint, or to crush them into a dense inner concentration and, by ingesting, cherish them. To steal away, to vanish; no more; to hold within oneself every gleam, every ray, deny oneself every vent, suffocating in the depths of the soul the conflicts that so idly trouble it, give them their quietus; to hide oneself, to obliterate oneself; perchance to awaken elsewhere, unchanged.

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