Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvinowas an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy, the Cosmicomics collection of short stories, and the novels Invisible Citiesand If on a winter's night a traveler...
NationalityItalian
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth15 October 1923
CountryItaly
mirrors contemplating knows
The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves
motivational travel lying
Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
cities giving delight
You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.
sad taken melancholy
Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
library harbors
What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?
photography ifs
Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images.
moments lost found
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 will be my moment again, perhaps once again I shall understand nothing, I shall grasp that other knowledge, found and lost in an instant.
hate writing what-matters
To write well about the elegant world you have to know it and experience it to the depths of your being... what matters is not whether you love it or hate it, but only to be quite clear about your position regarding it.
cities lost quarters
The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.
honesty falsehood
Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.
travel natural foreigners
The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
zero moving mean
This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts bring with it consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it. . . .
race break-off two
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, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.
struggle literature limits
The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.