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The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.

Italo Calvino

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Italo Calvino
Age: 62 †
Born: 1923
Born: January 15
Died: 1985
Died: September 19
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Santiago de Compostela de las Vegas
Italo Giovanni Calvino Mameli
Italo Giovanni Calvino
Things
Special
Written
Reading
Halo
Around
Halos
Also
Numerous
Doe
Necessarily
Give
Illusion
Giving
Novel

More quotes by Italo Calvino

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If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.
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The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
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It is only after you have come to know the surface of things ... that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.
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I am a prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume.
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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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We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.
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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.
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Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. There is the blueprint, they say.
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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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Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book.
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A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.
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Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.
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You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before
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Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
Italo Calvino
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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.
Italo Calvino
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The book I'm looking for,' says the blurred figure, who holds out a volume similar to yours, 'is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world.
Italo Calvino
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They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.
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Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don't mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification.
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Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
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A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
Italo Calvino