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Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead.
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
Dead
Compact
Living
Gems
Shows
Smells
Body
Breath
Like
Breaths
Smell
Ancient
Fragmentary
Remains
Cairo
More quotes by Italo Calvino
The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.
Italo Calvino
The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
Italo Calvino
The soul is often in the surface, and the importance of 'depth' is overestimated.
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
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.
Italo Calvino
We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.
Italo Calvino
You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before
Italo Calvino
How well I would write if I were not here!
Italo Calvino
What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.
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
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 still one of which you never speak.' Marco Polo bowed his head. 'Venice,' the Khan said. Marco smiled. 'What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?' The emperor did not turn a hair. 'And yet I have never heard you mention that name.' And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.
Italo Calvino
It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible
Italo Calvino
The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.
Italo Calvino
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.
Italo Calvino
The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves
Italo Calvino
Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities.
Italo Calvino
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
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
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
