"How well I would write if I were not here!"
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Quote collection
Italo Calvino quotes (page 4 of 8)
145 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world."
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"Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie."
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"...Life is nothing but trading smells."
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"Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky."
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"Falsehood is never in words; it is in things."
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"The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions."
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"Something must always remain that eludes us ... For power to have an object on which it can be exercised, a space in which to stretch out its arms ... As long as I know there exists in the world someone who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading's sake, I can convince myself that the world continues ... And every evening I, too, abandon myself to reading, like that distant unknown woman."
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"Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered."
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"The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts."
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"Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist."
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"Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst."
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"Memories images, once they are fixed in words, are erased."
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"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears."
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"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."
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"It is only after you have come to know the surface of things ... that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible."
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"You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask."
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"If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space."
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"Success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search... for the sentence in which every word is unalterable."
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"It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on by light; the hour in which one is least certain of the world's existence."
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