"...and every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips……" — Italo Calvino
"...and every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady's perfume in his jailbird's suit. And I'm left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells."
—
Italo Calvino
★
★
★
★
★
0.0 avg (0 ratings)
178 Quotes by Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino has 178 quotes on this site.
A few more worth reading:
-
The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.
-
Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances,…
-
In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.
-
It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
-
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
-
The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born.…
-
The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.
-
The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he…
-
What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's…
-
It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually…
-
The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as…
-
The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same…
See all 178 quotes by Italo Calvino »
More Alone Quotes
This quote is filed under Alone Quotes,
one of 10,353 quotes in that category. Here are a few more:
-
I try to push ideas away, and the ones that will not leave me alone are the ones that ultimately…
— J. J. Abrams
-
There's love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we're alone in our heads.
— Paul Auster
-
I really enjoy being single again. I spent a lot of time in a relationship and the nearer we came…
— Dido Armstrong
-
India is the meeting place of the religions and among these Hinduism alone is by itself a vast and complex…
— Sri Aurobindo
-
Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her…
— Jane Austen
-
I hate cameras. They interfere, they're always in the way. I wish: if I could work with my eyes alone.
— Richard Avedon
-
Mental prayer in my opinion is nothing else than an intimate sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to…
— Teresa of Avila
-
While the soul is in mortal sin, nothing can profit it; none of its good works merit an eternal reward,…
— Teresa of Avila
-
The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by our senses, the harder it will be…
— Diane Ackerman
-
The average Nigerian person has come to reconcile himself with the fact that his or her social progress remain essentially…
— Ibrahim Babangida
-
In today's interdependent world, a threat to one becomes a menace to all. And no state can defeat these challenges…
— Michelle Bachelet
-
We neither laugh alone, nor weep alone, why then should we pray alone?
— Anna Letitia Barbauld
See all 10,353 Alone Quotes »