Italo Calvino (1923 - 1985)

Italo Calvino quotes

• 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.

  Italo Calvino

• Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

  Italo Calvino

• You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.

  Italo Calvino

• Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.

  Italo Calvino

• Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.

  Italo Calvino

• Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.

  Italo Calvino

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

  Italo Calvino

• If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable.

  Italo Calvino

• What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?

  Italo Calvino