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Very often the effort men put into activities that seem completely useless turns out to be extremely important in ways no one could foresee. Play has always been the mainspring of culture.

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
Play
Completely
Important
Seem
Way
Ways
Mainspring
Always
Effort
Foresee
Men
Turns
Activities
Culture
Extremely
Often
Useless
Seems
Activity

More quotes by Italo Calvino

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Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
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Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities.
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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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Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.
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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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What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?
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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 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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Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.
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Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.
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The soul is often in the surface, and the importance of 'depth' is overestimated.
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For the man who thought he was Man there is no salvation.
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seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space
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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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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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Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.
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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.
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Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. There is the blueprint, they say.
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What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious.
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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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