550 Quotes by Italo Calvino

To plan a book — or an escape — the first thing to know is what to exclude.

You, reader, believed that there, on the platform, my gaze was glued to the hands of the round clock of an old station, hands pierced like halberds, in the vain attempt to turn them back, to move backward over the cemetery of spent hours, lying lifeless in their circular pantheon.

Everything in the garden was like that: lovely but impossible to enjoy properly, with that worrying feeling inside that they were only there through an odd stroke of luck, and the fear that they'd soon have to give an account of themselves.

There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive. They are announcements or presages that concern me and the world at once: for my part, not only the external events of my existence but also what happens inside, in the depths of me; and for the world, not some particular event but the general way of being of all things.

His memory, if he could patiently reconstruct the hours he passed, second by second, promised him boundless Edens.

His memory, if he could patiently reconstruct the hours he had passed, second by second, promised him boundless Edens.

...in everything that was most remote from her lay the value of having her, the sense of his being the one who had her.

Of course, if I chose to be an optimist, there was always the possibility that, if our two parallels continued to infinity, the moment would come when they would touch.

We can know nothing about what is outside us if we overlook ourselves, he thinks now. The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves.