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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.

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
Books
Shelves
Asks
Spot
Comes
Spots
Book
Cry
Continue
Among
Beyond
Shrill
Rest
Undefined

More quotes by Italo Calvino

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Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave. You cand resume your flight whereever you like, they say to me, but you will arive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the names of the airport changes.
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Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book.
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Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.
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A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
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The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.
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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.
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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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Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.
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Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. There is the blueprint, they say.
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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.
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How well I would write if I were not here!
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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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The novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible.
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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.
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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.
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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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At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.
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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Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.
Italo Calvino
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Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities.
Italo Calvino