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Italo Calvino Quotes

Italo Calvino quotes

Italian Journalist, Writer October 15, 1923 – September 19, 1985

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Quotes

The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest-for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both-must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story. Italo Calvino
The body is a uniform! The body is armed militia! The body is violent action! The body claims power! The body's at war! The body declares itself subject! The body is an end and not a means! The body signifies! Communicates! Shouts! Protests! Subverts! Italo Calvino
How is it possible to defeat not the authors but the functions of the author, the idea that behind each book there is someone who guarantees a truth in that world of ghosts and inventions by the mere fact of having invested in it his own truth, of having identified himself with that construction of words? Italo Calvino
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure,... Italo Calvino
So you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity. Italo Calvino
Perhaps, for each of them, I also resembled someone who was dead. I had barely arrived at Adelma and I was already one of them, I had gone over to their side, absorbed in that kaleidescope of eyes, wrinkles, grimaces. Italo Calvino
Don't ask where the rest of this book is!" It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. "All books continue in the beyond... Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quote: "A classic is the term given to any book which comes to..."
A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans. Italo Calvino
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 rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls. Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quote: "Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead..."
Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches. Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quote: "I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a..."
I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains. Italo Calvino
The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to concern himself with the world that repels him. Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino quote: "A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has..."
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. Italo Calvino
The lawn mower attends with defeaning shudder to the tonsure; a light odor of fresh hay intoxicates the air; the leveled grass finds again a bristling infancy; but the bite of the blades reveals unevenness, mangy clearings, yellow patches. Italo Calvino
It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the sparks that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances. Italo Calvino

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