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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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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
Men
World
Employs
Renew
Instrument
Instruments
Constantly
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The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.
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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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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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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.
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Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave. You cand resume your flight whereever you like, they say to me, but you will arive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the names of the airport changes.
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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.
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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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At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.
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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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For the man who thought he was Man there is no salvation.
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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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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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They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.
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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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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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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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Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.
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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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The soul is often in the surface, and the importance of 'depth' is overestimated.
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You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before
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