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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.

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
Arrive
Distant
Quarters
Understood
Cities
Lost
Crossed
Unfamiliar

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The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves
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It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
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Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
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To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in a place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished.
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Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
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The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.
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I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.
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Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.
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Having exhausted every possibility at the moment when he was coming full circle, Antonino realised that photographing photographs was the only course that he had left - or, rather, the true course he had obscurely been seeking all this time. (Last line of the story The Adventure of a Photographer )
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It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible
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...Life is nothing but trading smells.
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When I'm writing a book I prefer not to speak about it, because only when the book is finished can I try to understand what I've really done and to compare my intentions with the result.
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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.
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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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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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Don't ask where the rest of this book is! It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. All books continue in the beyond.
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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.
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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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Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
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Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.
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