Italo Calvino Quotes

“What is more natural than that a solidity, a complicity, a bond should be established between Reader and Reader, thanks to the book? You can leave the bookshop content, you, a man who thought that the period where you could still expect something from life had ended. You are bearing with you two different expectations, and both promise days of pleasant hopes; the expectation contained in the book - of a reading experience you are impatient to resume - and the expectation contained in that telephone number - of hearing again the vibrations, a times treble and at times smoldering, of that voice, when it will answer your first phone call in a while, in fact tomorrow, with the fragile pretext of the book, to ask her if she likes it or not, to tell her how many pages you have read or not read, to suggest to her that you meet again...”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

Romance Reading Books

“Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

Time Reading Novel

Author:Italo Calvino

Reading Books

“Reading is solitude. One reads alone, even in another's presence.”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

Reading Literature Books Solitude Words

“You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don't say a great deal. So much the better, there is no message that indiscreetly outshouts the message that the book itself must communicate directly, that you must extract from the book, however much or little it may be. Of course, this circling of the book, too, this reading around it before reading inside it, is a part of the pleasure in a new book, but like all preliminary pleasures, it has its optimal duration if you want it to serve as a thrust toward the more substantial pleasure of the consummation of the act, namely the reading of the book.”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

Reading Books Marketing Flap

“I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read," a third reader says, "but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment. At other moments, on the contrary, I seem to retain the memory of the readings of a single book one next to another, enthusiastic or cold or hostile, scattered in time without a perspective, without a thread that ties them together. The conclusion I have reached is that reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext.”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

Book Reading Book Reading Rereading Object Of Reading

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

“Reading is solitude.”

Reading Solitude

“Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead...." "Or that is not present because it does not yet exist, something desire, feared, possible or impossible," Ludmilla says. "Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be....”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

“Don't you ever get tired of reading?" she asked. "You could hardly be called good company! Don't you know that, with women, you're supposed to make conversation?" she added; her half smile was perhaps meant to be ironic, though to Amedeo, who at that moment would have paid anything rather than give up his novel, it seemed downright threatening.”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

Reading Run Away Bad Idea Lectophilia Mixed Marriages Never Work Relationship Nightmare

Book:Difficult Loves

Source: Difficult Loves

“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. …Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!… I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!”

“For many years Cavedagna has followed books as they are made, bit by bit, he sees books be born and die every day, and yet the true books for him remain others, those of the time when for him they were like messages from other worlds. And so it is with authors: he deals with them every day, he knows their fixations, indecisions, susceptibilities, egocentricities, and yet the true authors remain those who for him were only a name on a jacket, a word that was part of the title, authors who had the same reality as their characters, as the places mentioned in the books, who existed and didn't exist at the same time, like those characters and those countries. The author was an invisible point from which the books came, a void traveled by ghosts, an underground tunnel that put other worlds in communication with the chicken coop of his boyhood....”

Author:Italo Calvino

Writing Reading Literature

“Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them. Of course this happens when a classic text 'works' as a classic, that is when it establishes a personal relationship with the reader. If there is no spark, the exercise is pointess: it is no use reading classics out of a sense of duty or respect, we should only read them for love.”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

Love Reading Classics

Book:Why Read the Classics?

Source: Why Read the Classics?

“I prefer novels,” she adds, “that bring me immediately into a world where everything is precise, concrete, specific. I feel a special satisfaction in knowing what things are made in that certain fashion and not otherwise, even the most common place things that in real life seem indifferent to me.” “The book I would like to read now is a novel in which you sense the story arriving like still-vague thunder, the historical story along with the individual story, a novel that gives the sense of living through an upheaval that still has no name, has not yet taken shape…” “The novels I prefer,” she says, “are those that make you feel uneasy from the very first page.” “I like books,” she says, “where all the mysteries and anguish pass through a precise and a cold mind, without shadows, like the mind of a chess player.” “The novels that attract me most,” Ludmilla said, “are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel and perverse as possible.” “The quality of perennial dissatisfaction seems to me characteristic of Ludmilla: it seems to me that her preferences change overnight and today reflect only her restless.” “Do you mean to deny you have a sister?” “I have a sister, but I don’t see what that has to do with anything.” “A sister who loves novels with characters whose psychology is upsetting and complicated?” “My sister always says she loves novels where you feel an elemental strength, primordial, telluric. That’s exactly what she says: telluric.” “The book I’m looking for,” says the blurred figure who holds out a volume similar to yours, “is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world.”

Reading Books Ludmilla The Novels I Prefer

“For this woman,” Arkadian Porphyrich continues, seeing how intently you are drinking in his words, “reading means stripping herself of every forgone conclusion, to be ready to catch a voice that comes from an unknown source, from somewhere beyond the book, beyond the author, beyond the conventions of writing: from the unsaid, from what the world has not yet said of itself and does not yet have the words to say.”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

“Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings. This does not come about without effort: to compose that general book, each individual book must be transformed, entered into a relationship with the books I have read previously, become their corollary or development or confutation or gloss or reference text. For years I have been coming to this library, and I explore it volume by volume, shelf by shelf, but I could demonstrate to you that I have done nothing but continue the reading of a single book.”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

“I feel the jealousy of my books, which would like to be read the way she reads.”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

“Would you like to be in his place, to establish that exclusive bond, that communion of inner rhythm that is achieved through a book’s being read at the same time, by two people, as you thought possible with Ludmilla?”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

Reading Readers

“Let’s have a look at the books. The first thing noticed, at least on looking at those you have most prominent, is that the function of books for you is immediate reading; they are not instruments of study or reference or components of a library arranged according to some order. Perhaps on occasion you have tried to give a semblance of order to your shelves, but every attempt at classification was rapidly foiled by heterogeneous acquisitions. The chief reason for the juxtaposition of volumes, besides the dimensions of the tallest or the shortest, remains chronological, as they arrived here, one after the other, anyway you can always put your hand on any one. …and perhaps you don’t find yourself hunting for a book you have already read.”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

Reading Bookshelves

“There are books I find likable, and books I can’t bear, and I keep coming across them.”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

Reading Books

“You are at your desk, you have set the book among your business papers as if by chance; at a certain moment you shift the file and you find the book before your eyes, you open it absently, you rest your elbows on the desk, you rest your temples against your hands, curled into fists, you seem to be concentrating on an examination of the papers and instead you are exploring the first pages of the novel. Gradually you settle back in the chair, you raise the book to the level of your nose, you tilt your chair, poised on its rear legs, you pull out a side drawer of the desk to prop your feet on it: the position of the feet during reading is of maximum importance, you stretch your legs out on the top of the desk, on the files to be expedited. But doesn’t this seem to show a lack of respect? Of respect that is, not for your job (nobody claims to pass judgment on your professional capacities: we assume that your duties are a normal element n the system of unproductive activities that occupies such a large part of the national and international economy), but for the book. Worse still if you belong—willingly or unwillingly—to the number of those for whom working means really working, performing, whether deliberately or without premeditation, something necessary or at least not useless for others as well as for oneself; then the book you have brought with you to your place of employment like a kind of amulet or talisman exposes you to intermittent temptations, a few seconds at a time subtracted from the principal object of your attention, whether it is the perforations of electronic cards, the burners of a kitchen stove, the controls of a bulldozer, a patient stretched out on the operating table with his guts exposed. In other words, it’s better for you to restrain your impatience and wait to open the book at home.”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

“So here you are now, ready to attack the first lines of the first page. You prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone of the author. No. You don't recognize it at all. But now that you think about it, who ever said this author had an unmistakable tone? On the contrary, he is known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself. Here, however, he seems to have absolutely no connection with all the rest he has written, at least as far as you can recall. Are you disappointed? Let’s see. Perhaps at first you feel a bit lost, as when a person appears who, from the name, you identified with a certain face, and you try to make the features you are seeing tally with those you had in mind, and it won’t work. But you go on and you realize that the book is readable nevertheless, independently of what you expected of the author, it’s the book itself that arouses your curiosity, in fact, on sober reflection, you prefer it this way, confronting something and not quite knowing yet what it is.”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

“Reading is a discontinuous and fragmentary operation. Or rather, the object of reading is punctiform and pulviscular material. In the spreading expanse of the writing, the reader’s attention isolates some minimal segments, juxtapositions of words, metaphors, syntactic nexuses, logical passages, lexical peculiarities that prove to possess an extremely concentrated density of meaning. They are like elemental particles making up the work’s nucleus, around which all the rest revolves or else like the void at the bottom of a vortex which sucks in and swallows currents. It is through these apertures that, in barely perceptible flashes, the truth the book may bear is revealed, its ultimate substance. Myth and mysteries consist of impalpable little granules like the pollen that sticks to a butterfly’s legs, only those who have realized this can expect revelations and illuminations. This is why my attention, in contrast to what you, sir, were saying, cannot be detached from the written lines even for an instant. I must not be distracted if I do not wish to miss some valuable clue. Every time I come upon one of these clumps of meaning I must go on digging around to see if the nugget extends into a vein. This is why my reading has no end. I read and reread, each time seeking the confirmation of a new discovery among the folds of the sentences.”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

“In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out: the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment, the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case, the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer, the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves, the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified. Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them. With a zigzag and a dash you shake them off and leap straight into the citadel of the New Books Whose Author or Subject Appeals To You. Even inside this stronghold you can make some breaches in the ranks of the defenders, dividing them into New (for you in general) and New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Completely Unknown (at least to you), and defining the attraction they have for you on the basis of your desires and needs for the new and the not new (for the new you seek in the not new and for the not new you seek in the new). All this means that, having rapidly glanced over the titles of the volumes displayed in the bookshop, you turn toward a stack of If on a winter’s night a traveler fresh off the press, you have grasped a copy, and you have carried it to the cashier so that your right to own it can be established. You cast another bewildered look at the books around you (or, rather: it was the books that looked at you, with the bewildered gaze of dogs who, from their cages in the city pound, see a former companion go off on the leash of his master, come to rescue him), and out you went. You derive a special pleasure from a just-published book, and it isn’t only a book you are taking with you but the novelty as well, which could also merely be that of an object fresh from the factory, the youthful bloom of new books, which lasts until the dust jacket begins to yellow, until a veil of smog settles on the top edge, until the bindings become dog-eared, in the rapid autumn of libraries. No, you hope always to encounter true newness, which having been new once, will continue to be so. Having read the freshly published book, you will take possession of this newness at the first moment, without having to pursue, to chase it. Will it happen this time? You can never tell. Let’s see how it begins.”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

Reading Books Bookstores

“the position of the feet during reading is of maximum importance”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

“The moment that counts most for me is the one that precedes reading. At times a title is enough to kindle in me the desire for a book that perhaps does not exist.”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

Reading Titles

“The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, "I read, therefore it writes.”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

Writing Art Reading

“Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

Writing Reading Language

Book:Invisible Cities

Source: Invisible Cities

“Ludmilla, now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds. Hearing also has its role, alert to your gasps and your trills. It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of raeding: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and spreading your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being.”

Reading Italo Calvino

“A person, for example, reads in adulthood a book that is important for him, and it makes him say, "How could I have lived without reading it!" and also, "What a pity I did not read it in my youth!" Well, these statements do not have much meaning, especially the second, because after he has read that book, his life becomes the life of a person who has read that book, and it is of little importance whether he read it early or late, because now his life before that reading also assumes a form shaped by that reading.”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

Life Time Reading

Book:Mr Palomar

Source: Mr Palomar

“Sections in the bookstore - Books You Haven't Read - Books You Needn't Read - Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading - Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written - Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered - Books You Mean to Read But There Are Others You Must Read First - Books Too Expensive Now and You'll Wait 'Til They're Remaindered - Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback - Books You Can Borrow from Somebody - Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too - Books You've Been Planning to Read for Ages - Books You've Been Hunting for Years Without Success - Books Dealing with Something You're Working on at the Moment - Books You Want to Own So They'll Be Handy Just in Case - Books You Could Put Aside Maybe to Read This Summer - Books You Need to Go with Other Books on Your Shelves - Books That Fill You with Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified - Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time to Re-read - Books You've Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It's Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them”

Humor Reading Books

“Tomorrow, Reader and Other Reader, if you are together, if you lie down in the same bed like a settled couple, each will turn to the lamp at the side of the bed and sink into his or her book; two parallel readings will accompany the approach of sleep; first you, then you will turn out the light; returning from separated universes, you will find each other fleetingly in the darkness, where all separations are erased, before divergent dreams draw you again, one to one side, and one to the other. But do not wax ironic on this prospect of conjugal harmony: what happier image of a couple could you set against it?”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

Happiness Reading Marriage Books

“I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

Want Reading Disturbed

Author:Italo Calvino

“The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.”

Giving Doe Reading Novel Written Special Illusion Halos

“You have with you the book you were reading in the cafe, which you are eager to continue, so that you can then hand it on to her, to communicate again with her through the channel dug by others' words, which, as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and hers, a language, a code between the two of you, a means to exchange signals and recognize each other.”

Source: If On A Winter's Night A Traveller

Mean Made Two Book Hands Reading Language Voice Silent Communicate Aliens Code Signals Ink Cafes Spacing

Author: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. 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.”

Ifs Different Whole Wanted Three Reading Sex Space Models Episodes Time And Space Climax

“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.”

Source: If On A Winter's Night A Traveller

Ifs Night Reading Novel Winter Traveler Winter Night

“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your voice -- they won't hear you otherwise -- "I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything: just hope they'll leave you alone.”

Source: If On A Winter's Night A Traveller

Ifs World Want Night Reading Next Speak Voice Rooms Watches Novel Doors Heard Havens Tvs Raises Winter Relax Fades Traveler Say Anything Disturbed Racket Raise Your Voice

“Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.”

Source: If On A Winter's Night A Traveller

Knows Book Reading Philosophical

“Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.”

Source: If on a winter's night a traveler

Stories Today Reading Objects Unwritten