Quote

It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on by light the hour in which one is least certain of the world's existence.

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
Night
Seem
Uncertain
Faintly
Light
Color
Colors
Accompanies
Certain
Lose
Touched
Limbo
Seems
Loses
Cross
Breathed
World
Least
Crosses
Meanwhile
Existence
Hour
Accompany
Morning
Shadow
Consistency
Hours
Objects
Gradually

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The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.
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How well I would write if I were not here!
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Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
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At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.
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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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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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The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.
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Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function.
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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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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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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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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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The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.
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The soul is often in the surface, and the importance of 'depth' is overestimated.
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Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.
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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 time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities.
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Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
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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.
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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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