"The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines."
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Quote collection
Italo Calvino quotes (page 5 of 8)
145 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will come to count—leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries"
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"When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign - a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don't want to hear the word mentioned."
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"It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books."
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"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."
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"You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst."
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"Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world."
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"The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies."
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"The soul is often in the surface, and the importance of 'depth' is overestimated."
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"The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss."
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"The novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible."
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"Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story."
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"The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time."
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"You have with you the book you were reading in the cafe, which you are eager to continue, so that you can then hand it on to her, to communicate again with her through the channel dug by others' words, which, as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and hers, a language, a code between the two of you, a means to exchange signals and recognize each other."
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"One reads alone, even in another's presence."
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"Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead."
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"Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable."
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"The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death."
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"I could distinguish the shape of her bosom, her arms, her thighs, just as I remember them now, just as now, when the Moon has become that flat, remote circle, I still look for her as soon as the first sliver appears in the sky, and the more it waxes, the more clearly I imagine I can see her, her or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand different vistas, she who makes the Moon the Moon and, whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them."
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"In general confusion youth recognizes itself and rejoices."
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