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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.

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
Every
Books
Disappointment
Unlucky
Believe
Pleasure
Field
Expectation
Like
Stills
Expectations
Grant
Still
Areas
Grants
May
Fields
Carefully
Wells
Lucky
Precisely
Circumscribed
Book
Risk
Denied
Legitimately
Well
Serious
Area
Youthful

More quotes by Italo Calvino

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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.
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Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities.
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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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At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.
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Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
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The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.
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The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.
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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.
Italo Calvino
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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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Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
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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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Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.
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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