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The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.

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
Escape
Limits
Struggle
Confines
Literature
Stirs
Call
Stretches
Fact
Utmost
Language
Dictionary
Facts
Attraction

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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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A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
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My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.
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The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.
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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.
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Don't ask where the rest of this book is! It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. All books continue in the beyond.
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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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The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand
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Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.
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Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.
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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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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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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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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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You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before
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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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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.
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What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.
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What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious.
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The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow.
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