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Time Quotes by Italo Calvino

55 Time quotes by Italo Calvino

All Time quotes Italo Calvino’s page

The city’s streets hold the past like the lines on a hand, giving a quiet hope when something is unclear. He calls time a perpetual catastrophe, notes that the dead soon outnumber the living, and trusts literature to give us what nothing else can. He also reflects on prejudice and on a tormented city that repeatedly decays and blooms.

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

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The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand

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“time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.”

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Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities.

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At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.

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Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.

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I have spent more time with other people's books than with my own. I do not regret it.

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“My empire has grown too far toward the outside. It is time,’ the Khan thought, ‘for it to grow within itself.”

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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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“My faith in the future of literature rests on the knowledge that there are things that only literature, with its particular capacities,…

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“...And meanwhile the Galaxy ran through space and left behind those signs old and new and I still hadn't found mine.”

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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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…we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.

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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…

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“... we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.”

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Having exhausted every possibility at the moment when he was coming full circle, Antonino realised that photographing photographs was the only course…

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“Clarice, the glorious city, has a tormented history. Several times it decayed, then burgeoned again, always keeping the first Clarice as an…

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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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“Because in this way all I did was to accumulate past after past behind me, multiplying the pasts, and if one life…

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“In fact the problem Leopardi is facing is speculative and metaphysical, a problem in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Descartes…

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“When I got here my first thought was: Maybe I achieved such an effort with my thoughts that time has made a…

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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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“It could be an important feature to be added to your portrait: your mind has interior walls that allow you to partition…

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“It was on the fifteenth of June, 1767, that Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, my brother, sat among us for the last time.…

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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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“Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in…

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A writer's work has to take account of many rhythms: Vulcan's and Mercury's, a message of urgency obtained by dint of patient…

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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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“There is the moment when the silence of the countryside gathers in the ear and breaks into a myriad of sounds:a croaking…

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“KUBLAI: I do not know when you have had time to visit all the countries you describe to me. It seems to…

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“When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city. Finally he comes to Isidora,…

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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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“Valdrada’s inhabitants know that each of their actions is, at once, that action and its mirror-image, which possesses the special dignity of…

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

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“In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered,…

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“Hence that state of mind at once gloomy and euphoric which one associates with carrying out the rubbish; and the way we…

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“The clock is Shandy’s first symbol: under its influence, he is conceived and his misfortunes begin, which are the same thing according…

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“You fasten your seatbelt. The plane is landing. To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you…

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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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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…