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Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.

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
Futures
Achieved
Branches
Dead
Past

More quotes by Italo Calvino

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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.
Italo Calvino
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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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In politics, as in every other sphere of life, there are two important principles for a man of any sense: don't cherish too many illusions, and never stop believing that every little bit helps.
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Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.
Italo Calvino
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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
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Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst.
Italo Calvino
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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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Falsehood is never in words it is in things.
Italo Calvino
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Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function.
Italo Calvino
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The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.
Italo Calvino
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A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
Italo Calvino
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You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.
Italo Calvino
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The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand
Italo Calvino
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The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
Italo Calvino
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When I'm writing a book I prefer not to speak about it, because only when the book is finished can I try to understand what I've really done and to compare my intentions with the result.
Italo Calvino
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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
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The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves
Italo Calvino
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Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
Italo Calvino
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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.
Italo Calvino
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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