Quote

Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

Italo Calvino

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Waiting
Wait
Lying
Travel
Past
Places
Foreignness
Lies
Arriving
City
Traveler
Motivational
Possess
Longer
Finds
Cities
Foreign

More quotes by Italo Calvino

Image
Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities.
Italo Calvino
Image
Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
Italo Calvino
Image
Very often the effort men put into activities that seem completely useless turns out to be extremely important in ways no one could foresee. Play has always been the mainspring of culture.
Italo Calvino
Image
Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then or never again.
Italo Calvino
Image
Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings...if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough.
Italo Calvino
Image
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.
Italo Calvino
Image
The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.
Italo Calvino
Image
Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
Italo Calvino
Image
Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.
Italo Calvino
Image
Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.
Italo Calvino
Image
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand
Italo Calvino
Image
Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.
Italo Calvino
Image
The novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible.
Italo Calvino
Image
It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible
Italo Calvino
Image
Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased, Polo said. Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.
Italo Calvino
Image
I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.
Italo Calvino
Image
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.
Italo Calvino
Image
You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before
Italo Calvino
Image
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.
Italo Calvino
Image
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