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Reading Quotes by Italo Calvino

39 Reading quotes by Italo Calvino

All Reading quotes Italo Calvino’s page

Reading is solitude, even when others are near. Calvino describes how each reader becomes an unwritten story for the other, and how hours can slip by while turning pages. He says reading points toward something unknown, a future that no one yet sees.

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“Since I have become a slave of writing, the pleasure of reading has ended for me.”

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Reading is a possession, a march toward a possession.

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I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!

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I spend 12 hours a day reading on most days of the year.

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“Reading is solitude. One reads alone, even in another's presence.”

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“The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, "I read, therefore it writes.”

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A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.

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Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.

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Every day I tell myself that reading newspapers is a waste of time, but then... I cannot do without them. They are…

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“We can prevent reading: but in the decree that forbids reading there will be still read something of the truth that we…

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You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.

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“The moment that counts most for me is the one that precedes reading. At times a title is enough to kindle in…

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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…

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“For years I have been coming to this library, and I explore it volume by volume, shelf by shelf, but I could…

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Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my…

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“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other…

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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…

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“As long as I know there exists in the world someone who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as…

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“I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather:that man is called 'I' and…

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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:…

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“How can you keep up with her, this woman who is always reading another book besides the one before her eyes, a…

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You have with you the book you were reading in the cafe, which you are eager to continue, so that you can…

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Something must always remain that eludes us ... For power to have an object on which it can be exercised, a space…

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“Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid material object,…

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“You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don't…

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“I say to myself that the result of the unnatural effort to which I subject myself, writing, must be the respiration of…

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“If you think about it, reading is a necessarily individual act, far more than writing. If we assume that writing manages to…

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“The moment that counts most for me is the moment that precedes reading. At times a title is enough to kindle in…

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“Don't you ever get tired of reading?" she asked. "You could hardly be called good company! Don't you know that, with women,…

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“I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read," a third reader says, "but at every rereading I…

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“Ludmilla, now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory,…

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“In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you…

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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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“Sections in the bookstore - Books You Haven't Read - Books You Needn't Read - Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading…

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“In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you…

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“Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only…

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“Lovers' reading of each other's bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs…

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Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.

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You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other…

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“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…

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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 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…