550 Quotes by Italo Calvino

L’umano arriva dove arriva l’amore, non ha confini se non quelli che gli diamo.

Perinthia’s astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations are wrong and their figures are unable to describe the heavens, or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters.

Life, thought the naked man, was a hell, with rare moments recalling some ancient paradise.

An outsider was taking my place, was becoming me, my cage with the starlings would become his, the stereoscope, the real Uhlan helmet hanging from a nail, all my things that I couldn’t take with me remained to him; or, rather, it was my relationship with things, places, people, that was becoming his, just as I was about to become him, to take his place among the things and people of his life.

Reader, it is time for your tempest-tossed vessel to come to port. What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library? Certainly there is one in the city from which you set out and to which you have returned after circling the world from book to book.

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. So here I am walking along this empty surface that is the world.

Her breast was young, the nipples rosy. Cosimo just grazed it with his lips, before Viola slid away over the branches as if she were flying, with him clambering after her, and that skirt of hers always in his face.

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...

Now that the book is finished, I know that this was not a hallucination, a sort of professional malady, but the confirmation of something I already suspected – folktales are real.