To fall asleep like a bird. To have a wing you could stick your head under, a world of branches suspended above the earthly world, barely glimpsed do… - Italo Calvino

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

Contemplating the stars he has become accustomed to considering himself an anonymous and incorporeal dot, almost forgetting that he exists; to deal now with human beings, he cannot help involving himself, and he no longer knows where his self is to be found.

There is a story that for me comes before all other stories and of which all the stories I read seem to carry an echo, immediately lost. In my readings I do nothing but seek that book read in my childhood, but what I remember of it is too little to enable me to find it again.