550 Quotes by Italo Calvino

Think what it would be like to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to cement, to plastic.

To fall asleep like a bird. To have a wing you could stick your head under, a world of branches suspended above the earthly world, barely glimpsed down below, muffled and remote. Once you begin rejecting your present state, there is no knowing where you can arrive.

Karta książki tylko wtedy jest coś warta, jeśli możesz ją odwrócić i dojrzeć za nią życie, które na nią napiera gwałtem i miesza wszystkie karty.

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

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

Reading is solitude.

Reading is solitude. One reads alone, even in another's presence.

Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.

A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.