Quotessence
Home / Authors / Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino Quotes

Journalist

Filter quotes by topic

AllReadingBookIfsCitiesItalo CalvinoWorldLiteratureWritingLanguageKnowsBooksMomentsSpacePeopleFirstsLoveStoriesDifferentFormIn Polish

Famous Italo Calvino Quotes

“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. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.”

IfsDifferentWholeWantedThreeReadingSexSpaceModelsEpisodesTime And SpaceClimax
Book:If On A Winter's Night A Traveller
Create image

“For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.”

FirstsDifferentNamesCitiesOne ThingReturnDeserveFirst TimeTrappedEnteringDifferent Names
Book:Invisible Cities
Create image

“Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don't mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification.”

ThinkingWorldShouldBelieveLooksMeanDifferentDreamSeemsHumanityI BelieveSpaceCryPerspectiveBattleApproachLogicMethodIrrationalEscapingCognitionDifferent PerspectiveWholeheartedlyHeavinessVerificationBattle CryPerseus
Author:Italo Calvino
Create image

“I could distinguish the shape of her bosom, her arms, her thighs, just as I remember them now, just as now, when the Moon has become that flat, remote circle, I still look for her as soon as the first sliver appears in the sky, and the more it waxes, the more clearly I imagine I can see her, her or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand different vistas, she who makes the Moon the Moon and, whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them.”

FirstsLooksLongStillsI CanDifferentRememberNightImagineSkyDogArmsThousandShapesMoonHundredCirclesFlatsAll NightBosomsThighsVistas
Book:The Complete Cosmicomics
Create image

“In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogenous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.”

DifferentRunningAgeLiteratureLanguageDifferencesWrittenRiskMediaCommunicationFunctionFollowingSurfaceBentSharpeningWritten Language
Author:Italo Calvino
Create image