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Life Quotes by Italo Calvino

39 Life quotes by Italo Calvino

All Life quotes Italo Calvino’s page

A story can turn a small understanding into a whole life, as Calvino suggests. The quotes point out that life mixes illusion and belief, and that the final event can reshape the meaning of everything before it. They also note that memories of the dead grow as we age.

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...Life is nothing but trading smells.

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I suffer from everyday life.

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I'm afraid I don't think I really have a life on which something can be written.

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“[...] a życie to tylko tarzanie się między łóżkiem a trumną [...]”

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The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.

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The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.

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“In the morning you wake from one bad dream and another begins.”

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“Life, thought the naked man, was a hell, with rare moments recalling some ancient paradise.”

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I do not understand how you can associate abortion with an idea of hedonism or the good life.

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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…

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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…

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“It was the love which the hunter has for living things, and which he can only express by aiming his gun at…

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I would very much like to be one of those writers who have something really clear in their head to say, and…

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The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.

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Nobody looks at the moon in the afternoon, and this is the moment when it would most require our attention, since its…

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“The art of writing tales consists in an ability to draw the rest of life from the little one has understood of…

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“The naked man had lost hope now; he would never be able to return to the earth's surface;he would never leave the…

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“Do you want to demonstrate that the living also have a wordless language, with which books cannot be written but which can…

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“...an archer, the moment he thinks he's experienced, is lost; every lion we encounter in our brief life is different from every…

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Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?…

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You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses…

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A person's life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not…

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This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to…

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“The living of Laudomia frequent the house of the unborn to interrogate them: footsteps echo beneath the hollow domes; the questions are…

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The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living…

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I speak and speak,” Marco says, “but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. The description of the world to…

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“You fight with dreams as with formless and meaningless life, seeking a pattern, a route that must surely be there, as when…

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“For “Copito de Nieve”, [...] the contact with the tire seems to be something affective, possessive, and somehow symbolic. From it he…

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“Marco enters a city; he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could…

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The minute you start saying something, 'Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!' you are already close to view of the person…

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The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the…

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“What is more natural than that a solidity, a complicity, a bond should be established between Reader and Reader, thanks to the…

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“For Kundera, the weight of living is found in all types of restriction, in the dense network of public and private restrictions…

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Your first book already defines you, while you are really far from being defined. And this definition is something you may then…

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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,…

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“If I had to choose an auspicious sign for the approach of the new millennium, I would choose this: the sudden nimble…

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“You only have to start saying of something : 'Ah, how beautiful ! We must photograph it !' and you are already…

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“If all material were transparent—the ground that supports us, the envelope that sheathes our body—everything would be seen not as a fluttering…

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“And so it is that in order to speak of our own times, I have had to make a long detour, by…

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More by Italo Calvino

“(one would say yes, if not every day, at least fairly regularly), whether only for yourself or also for others (often only for yourself,…

“The Great Khan tried to concentrate on the game: but now it was the game’s reason that eluded him. The end of every game…

“Or else you can say, like the camel driver who took me there: "I arrived here in my first youth, one morning, many people…

“The naked man had lost hope now; he would never be able to return to the earth's surface;he would never leave the bottom of…

“The art of writing tales consists in an ability to draw the rest of life from the little one has understood of it; but…

“I ask you to come down to earth," said the Baron in a calm, rather faint voice, "and to take up the duties of…

The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient…

“... KUBLAI: We have proved that if we were here, we would not be. POLO: And here, in fact, we are.”

“And yet, in Raissa, at every moment there is a child in a window who laughs seeing a dog that has jumped on a…

“Ludmilla, now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not…

“Once the process of falsification is set in motion, it won't stop. We're in a country where everything that can be falsified has been…

“Your case gives me new hope," I said to him. "With me, more and more often I happen to pick up a novel that…

We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.

“Perhaps it is this story that is a bridge over the void, and as it advances it flings forward news and sensations and emotions…

Yet, even now, ever time (often) that I find that I don't understand something, then instinctively, I'm filled with the hope that perhaps this…