"What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts."
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Quote collection
Italo Calvino quotes (page 3 of 8)
145 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"...and every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady's perfume in his jailbird's suit. And I'm left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells."
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"Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don't mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification."
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"You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before"
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"The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary."
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"Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places."
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"The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand"
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"Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images."
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"Nobody looks at the moon in the afternoon, and this is the moment when it would most require our attention, since its existence is still in doubt."
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"A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading."
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"In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision."
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"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.*"
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"Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book."
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"A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans."
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"I am a prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume."
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"Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities."
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"what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places."
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"To write well about the elegant world you have to know it and experience it to the depths of your being... what matters is not whether you love it or hate it, but only to be quite clear about your position regarding it."
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"The people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping...something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draw arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment, and other characters come on to the scene."
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"…we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears."
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