Quote

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

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
Lightness
Sad
Melancholy
Sadness
Taken

More quotes by Italo Calvino

Image
Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
Italo Calvino
Image
The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves
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
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.
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
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
Image
New York is perhaps the only place in America where you feel at the centre and not at the margins, in the provinces, so for that reason I prefer its horror to this privileged beauty, its enslavement to the freedoms which remain local and privileged and very particularized, and which do not represent a genuine antithesis.
Italo Calvino
Image
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.
Italo Calvino
Image
Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.
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
The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.
Italo Calvino
Image
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
Image
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.
Italo Calvino
Image
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
Image
seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space
Italo Calvino
Image
The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.
Italo Calvino
Image
The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.
Italo Calvino
Image
We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.
Italo Calvino
Image
Fantasy is like jam. . . . You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing . . . out of which you can’t make anything.
Italo Calvino
Image
You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before
Italo Calvino