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It is only after you have come to know the surface of things ... that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.

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
Seek
Come
Things
Inexhaustible
Underneath
Venture
Surface

More quotes by Italo Calvino

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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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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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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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For the man who thought he was Man there is no salvation.
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Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
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The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.
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Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
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The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.
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There is no language without deceit.
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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.
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Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered.
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Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst.
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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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Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
Italo Calvino
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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
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Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.
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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.
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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.
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It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
Italo Calvino
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Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then or never again.
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