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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.
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
Cat
Exist
City
Inside
Cities
Humanity
Animal
Men
Cats
More quotes by Italo Calvino
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
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.
Italo Calvino
The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.
Italo Calvino
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.
Italo Calvino
Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. There is the blueprint, they say.
Italo Calvino
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
Italo Calvino
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
Italo Calvino
The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.
Italo Calvino
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
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
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
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand
Italo Calvino
They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.
Italo Calvino
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.
Italo Calvino
Success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search... for the sentence in which every word is unalterable.
Italo Calvino
I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.
Italo Calvino
What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?
Italo Calvino
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 )
Italo Calvino
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.
Italo Calvino
The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves
Italo Calvino