Quote

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.

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
Heard
Describe
Bowed
Something
Names
City
Polo
Believe
Talking
Hair
Marco
Never
Turns
Cities
Marcos
Time
Speak
Turn
Venice
Else
Name
Emperor
Stills
Saying
Smiled
Still
Head
Mention
Khan

More quotes by Italo Calvino

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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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Falsehood is never in words it is in things.
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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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The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves
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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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Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.
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Having exhausted every possibility at the moment when he was coming full circle, Antonino realised that photographing photographs was the only course that he had left - or, rather, the true course he had obscurely been seeking all this time. (Last line of the story The Adventure of a Photographer )
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The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
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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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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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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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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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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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What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?
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For the man who thought he was Man there is no salvation.
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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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The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.
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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.
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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.
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Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
Italo Calvino