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

More quotes by Italo Calvino

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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
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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 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.
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Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings...if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough.
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Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
Italo Calvino
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Falsehood is never in words it is in things.
Italo Calvino
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At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.
Italo Calvino
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Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
Italo Calvino
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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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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
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It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible
Italo Calvino
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In politics, as in every other sphere of life, there are two important principles for a man of any sense: don't cherish too many illusions, and never stop believing that every little bit helps.
Italo Calvino
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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
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We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.
Italo Calvino
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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
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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.
Italo Calvino
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Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
Italo Calvino
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It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
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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.
Italo Calvino
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The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.
Italo Calvino