Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino

Writer

Italo Calvino was an Italian novelist known for his imaginative narratives and philosophical insights, particularly in works like 'Invisible Cities.'

Book Cities Reading Writing World People
Born
October 15, 1923
Died
September 19, 1985
Quotes
145
Rank
#261

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Italo Calvino quotes (page 6 of 8)

145 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

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"My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language. . . . Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world--qualities that stick to the writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them."

Writing Cities People
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"Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have."

Travel Mirrors Negative
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"Renouncing things is less difficult than people believe: it's all a matter of getting started. Once you've succeeded in dispensing with something you thought essential, you realize you can also do without something else, then without many other things."

Believe People Essentials
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"Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches."

Past Branches
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"Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do."

Police Irony States
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"We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly."

Men World Instruments
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"seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space"

Space Giving Inferno
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"every choice has its obverse, that is to say a renunciation, and so there is no difference between the act of choosing and the act of renouncing"

Differences Choices Renunciation
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"There is still one of which you never speak.' Marco Polo bowed his head. 'Venice,' the Khan said. Marco smiled. 'What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?' The emperor did not turn a hair. 'And yet I have never heard you mention that name.' And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice."

Believe Venice Hair
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"New York is perhaps the only place in America where you feel at the centre and not at the margins, in the provinces, so for that reason I prefer its horror to this privileged beauty, its enslavement to the freedoms which remain local and privileged and very particularized, and which do not represent a genuine antithesis."

New York America Horror
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"To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in a place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished."

Opposites Space Duration
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"Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function."

Goal Achievement Tasks
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"I had fallen in love. What I mean is: I had begun to recognize, to isolate the signs of one of those from the others, in fact I waited for these signs I had begun to recognize, I sought them, responded to those signs I awaited with other signs I made myself, or rather it was I who aroused them, these signs from her, which I answered with other signs of my own . . ."

Mean Facts Made
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"For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene."

Cities Names Different
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"In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogenous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language."

Running Communication Differences
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"The close-up has no equivalent in a narrative fashioned of words. Literature is totally lacking in any working method to enable it to isolate a single vastly enlarged detail in which one face comes forward to underline a state of mind or stress the importance of a single detail in comparison with the rest. As a narrative device, the ability to vary the distance between the camera and the object may be a small thing indeed, but it makes for a notable difference between cinema and oral or written narrative, in which the distance between language and image is always the same."

Distance Stress Differences
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"Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be."

Book Philosophical Reading
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"What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious."

Disappointment Believe Book
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"So began their love, the boy happy and amazed, she happy and not surprised at all (nothing happens by chance to girls). It was the love so long awaited by Cosimo and which had now inexplicably arrived, and so lovely that he could not imagine how he had even thought it lovely before. And the thing newest to him was that it was so simple, and the boy at that moment thought it must be like that always."

Girl Boys Simple
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