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Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

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
Like
Secret
Thread
Desire
Fears
Else
Absurd
Dream
Desires
Everything
Rules
Conceals
Even
Perspective
Deceitful
Made
Dreams
Perspectives
Something
Cities
Discourse

More quotes by Italo Calvino

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Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
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How well I would write if I were not here!
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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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Falsehood is never in words it is in things.
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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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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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To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in a place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished.
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…we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.
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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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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 universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves
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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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.
Italo Calvino
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Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.
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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
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When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign - a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don't want to hear the word mentioned.
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...Life is nothing but trading smells.
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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.
Italo Calvino
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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 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