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A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
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
Firsts
Book
First
Rereading
Much
Classic
Discovery
Offers
Reading
Sense
More quotes by 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
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.
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
Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
Italo Calvino
The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
Italo Calvino
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.
Italo Calvino
seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space
Italo Calvino
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.
Italo Calvino
…we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.
Italo Calvino
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
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.
Italo Calvino
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.
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
It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
Italo Calvino
The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.
Italo Calvino
Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.
Italo Calvino
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.
Italo Calvino
What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?
Italo Calvino
Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.
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
