"Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young."
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Quote collection
Italo Calvino quotes (page 2 of 8)
145 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness."
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"Fantasy is like jam. . . . You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing . . . out of which you can’t make anything."
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"Very often the effort men put into activities that seem completely useless turns out to be extremely important in ways no one could foresee. Play has always been the mainspring of culture."
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"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."
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"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."
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"You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger's passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are."
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"Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives."
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"Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings...if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough."
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"You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst."
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"You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours."
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"The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins."
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"Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top."
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"This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts bring with it consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it. . . ."
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"If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance."
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"The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there."
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"There is no language without deceit."
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"It is within you that the ghosts acquire voices."
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"What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?"
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"At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it."
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