Quote

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.

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
Line
Lines
Reality
Beautiful
Seems
Photographed
Narrow

More quotes by Italo Calvino

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You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before
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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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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.
Italo Calvino
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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.
Italo Calvino
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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.
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
Italo Calvino
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There is no language without deceit.
Italo Calvino
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A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
Italo Calvino
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Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.
Italo Calvino
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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
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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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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.
Italo Calvino
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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.
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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Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.
Italo Calvino
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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.
Italo Calvino
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Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.
Italo Calvino
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Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered.
Italo Calvino
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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.
Italo Calvino
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At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.
Italo Calvino