Quote

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.

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
Hands
Steps
Windows
Scrolls
Past
Cities
Flags
Antennae
Turn
Lightning
Rods
Doe
Lines
Corners
Poles
Every
Hand
Window
Segment
Like
Written
However
Scratches
Turns
City
Marked
Tell
Streets
Contains

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There is no language without deceit.
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It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
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A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
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Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
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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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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.
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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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The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.
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There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will come to count—leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries
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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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Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.
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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 soul is often in the surface, and the importance of 'depth' is overestimated.
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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.
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Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.
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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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Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.
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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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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.
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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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