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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.

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
Human
Assume
Modernism
Humans
Extremes
Modernity
Assuming
Imagining
Forms
Cycle
Present
Prisoner
Society
Cycles
Form
Reached
Unlivable
May
Extreme
Gaudy

More quotes by Italo Calvino

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The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.
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New York is perhaps the only place in America where you feel at the centre and not at the margins, in the provinces, so for that reason I prefer its horror to this privileged beauty, its enslavement to the freedoms which remain local and privileged and very particularized, and which do not represent a genuine antithesis.
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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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The book I'm looking for,' says the blurred figure, who holds out a volume similar to yours, 'is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world.
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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.
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At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.
Italo Calvino
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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.
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A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
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What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.
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...Life is nothing but trading smells.
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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.
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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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It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
Italo Calvino
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Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.
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Fantasy is like jam. . . . You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing . . . out of which you can’t make anything.
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You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before
Italo Calvino
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Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered.
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For the man who thought he was Man there is no salvation.
Italo Calvino
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The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves
Italo Calvino
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Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.
Italo Calvino