A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
I have spent more time with other people's books than with my own. I do not regret it. — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign - a bad sign mostly… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
Renouncing things is less difficult than people believe: it's all a matter of getting started. Once you've succeeded in dispensing with something… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people,… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest-for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both-must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people,… — Italo Calvino Copy Share
You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
...the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“(one would say yes, if not every day, at least fairly regularly), whether only for yourself or also for others (often only for yourself,… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“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 is a gain or a loss: but of what? What were the real stakes? At checkmate, beneath the foot of the king, knocked aside by the winner’s hand, nothingness remains: a black square, or a white… — Italo Calvino Copy Share
“Or else you can say, like the camel driver who took me there: "I arrived here in my first youth, one morning, many people were hurrying along the streets toward the market, the women had fine teeth and looked you straight in the eye, three soldiers on a platform played the trumpet, and all around wheels turned and colored banners… — Italo Calvino Copy Share
“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 this shaft, and he would go mad there drinking blood and eating human flesh, without ever being able to die. Up there, against the sky, there were good angels with ropes, and bad angels with grenades… — Italo Calvino Copy Share
“The art of writing tales consists in an ability to draw the rest of life from the little one has understood of it; but… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“I ask you to come down to earth," said the Baron in a calm, rather faint voice, "and to take up the duties of your station!" "I have no intention of obeying you, my Lord Father," said Cosimo. "I am very sorry." They were ill at ease, both of them, bored. Each knew what the other would say. "And what… — Italo Calvino Copy Share
The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“... KUBLAI: We have proved that if we were here, we would not be. POLO: And here, in fact, we are.” — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“And yet, in Raissa, at every moment there is a child in a window who laughs seeing a dog that has jumped on a shed to bite into a piece of polenta dropped by a stonemason who has shouted from the top of the scaffolding, "Darling, let me dip into it," to a young servant-maid who holds up a dish… — Italo Calvino Copy Share
“Ludmilla, now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds. Hearing also has its role, alert to your gasps and your trills. It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of raeding: the body matters… — Italo Calvino Copy Share
“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 falsified: paintings in museums, gold ingots, bus tickets. The counterrevolution and the revolution fight with salvos of falsification: the result is that nobody can be sure what is true and what is false, the political police… — Italo Calvino Copy Share
“Your case gives me new hope," I said to him. "With me, more and more often I happen to pick up a novel that… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
