Italo Calvino Quotes

“A person’s life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that is not chronological but, rather, corresponds to an inner architecture.”

“It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.”

“You’ll understand when you’ve forgotten what you understood before.”

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”

“The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves.”

“Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.”

“A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.”

“Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space . . . 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.”

“They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.”

“Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.”

“It is only after you have come to know the surface of things . . . that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.”

“Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.”

“In order really to live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second to madness.”

“Memories images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.”

“Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.”

“One should be light like a bird and not like a feather.”

“Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement.”

“I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.”

“I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses.”

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

“Once he was on the ship, Samphire Starboard did nothing but stand around all day long with his hands in his pockets and dream about the taverns he had left behind.”

“But by now every word, every gesture was foreseeable, as all else in that war which had lasted so many years, its every skirmish and duel conducted according to rules so that it was always known beforehand who would win or lose, be heroic or cowardly, be gutted or merely unhorsed and thumped.”

“Agilulf passed by, attentive, nervous and proud; people’s bodies gave him a disagreeable feeling resembling envy, but also a stab of pride, of contemptuous superiority.”

“I’ve already said we spent hours and hours in the trees, and not for utilitarian reasons, like many boys, who climb up just to look for fruit or birds’ nests, but for the pleasure of overcoming difficult protuberances and forks, and getting as high as possible, and finding beautiful places to stop and look at the world below, to make jokes and shout at those who passed under us.”

“Dauntless Little John was a wealthy youth indeed with all those gold pieces, and he lived happily in his palace. Then one day what should he do but look behind him and see his shadow: he was so frightened he died.”

“He was a better officer than many who vaunted themselves illustrious, the best of all officers, in fact. Yet there he was, walking unhappily in the night.”

“For the rest of the day our mother withdrew into her rooms to make lace and embroidery and filet, because in truth the generalessa was able to attend only to this traditional women’s work, and only here could she vent her warrior passion.”

“I was just eight then, everything seemed to me a game, the battle of us children against the adults was the battle that all children fight. I didn’t understand that my brother’s determination concealed something deeper.”

″...and the time she cooked a whole porcupine, with all its spines, who knows why, surely just to shock us when she raised the cover of the dish...”

″‘Why don’t you show your face to your king?’ A voice came clearly through the gorge piece. ‘Sire, because I do not exist!‘”

“Was it a bad thing or good? Who can say? Cosimo’s life was so far out of the ordinary, mine so orderly and modest, and yet our childhood was spent together, both of us indifferent to the adults’ obsessions, as we sought pathways different from those trodden by other people.”

“There, that cloud contains the Turks, the real Turks, and these men next to me, spitting tobacco, are veterans of Christendom, and this bugle now sounding its attack, the first attack in my life, and this roaring and shaking, this shooting star plunging to earth and treated with languid irritation by veterans and horses is a cannon ball, the first enemy cannon ball I’ve ever seen. May it not be the day when I’ll say- ‘And it’s my last.‘”

“He continued to think, not the lazy meandering thoughts of one about to fall asleep, but exact and definite thoughts.”

“He felt no nostalgia or doubt, or apprehension. Things were still indisputably whole as he was himself.”

“In many people the unrest of the age instills a need to become restless as well, but in the wrong direction, on the wrong track...”

“He looked at everything, and everything was as if nothing.”

“I, too, learned, because I followed him in everything, except that I, always more modest and prudent, jumped off halfway down the staircase, or slid down bit by bit, braking constantly.”

“The strong Terralba constitution had pulled him through. Now he was alive and half a man.”

“Here were his famous colleagues, the glorious paladins, but what were they? Here was their armor, proof of rank and name, of feats of power and worth, all reduced to a shell, to empty iron, and there lay the men themselves, snoring away, faces thrust into pillows with a thread of spittle dribbling from open lips.”

“Don’t dare tell your father that drunkard freed you. Tell him I freed you myself, since I’m the captain of the ship and ordered him to rescue you.”

″‘I was kidnapped by a huge octopus, whose prisoner I now am,’ said the king’s daughter. ‘Flee before it returns. But note that for three hours a day it changes into a red mullet and can be caught. But you have to kill the mullet at once, or it will change into a sea gull and fly away.‘”

“My uncle was then in his first youth, the age in which confused feelings, not yet sifted, all rush into good and bad, the age in which every new experience, even macabre and inhuman, is palpitating and warm with love of life.”

“What it was like to shut one’s eyes, lose consciousness, plunge into emptiness for a few hours and then wake up and find oneself the same as before, linked with the threads of one’s life again, Agilulf could not know...”

″‘By the power of the diamond,’ whispered the bride, ‘may the child laugh and dance and frolic!’ At that, the child started laughing, dancing, and frolicking.”

″‘Well, you there, looking so clean...’ said Charlemagne, who the longer the war lasted had less respect for cleanliness among his paladins.”

″‘Well, well! Who’d have thought it!’ exclaimed Charlemagne. ‘And how do you do your job, then, if you don’t exist?’ ‘By will power,’ said Agilulf, ‘and faith in our holy cause.‘”

“Agilulf Emo Bertrandin of the Guildivern and of the Others of Corbentraz and Sura, Knight of Selimpia Citeriore and Fez, was certainly a model soldier, but disliked by all.”

“He sensed the bloodshed in that cruel war, poured over the earth in innumerable streams, reaching even him, and he let it lap over him without feeling outrage or pity.”

“The long and short of it was that just half of him had been saved, the right part, which was perfectly preserved, without a scratch on it, except for that huge slash separating it from the left-hand part blown away.”

“Order the wedding banquet right away. But I’m asking one favor of you: since those three crones made me laugh so hard, let me invite them to the banquet.”

“Seven spindles of hemp! I have a daughter so crazy about work that she’d even spin the wool on the sheep’s back!”

″‘Kings and princes have brought entire armies to free the princess,’ said the fairy, ‘and every last one of them died.’ ‘All I have are my will and my courage,’ said the youth.”

″‘Ah, the mangy one!’ exclaimed the king of England. ‘The cruelest of all my enemies. He finally got what was coming to him. So you, valiant youth, are my godson! You shall marry my daughter and inherit my kingdom.‘”

″‘Rats, fine rats, help us!’ and we’ll be right there to help you.”

“The wind, coming to the city from far away, bring it unusual gifts, notice by only a few sensitive souls, such as hay-fever victims, who sneeze at the pollen from flowers of other lands.”

“it was Saturday; and Marcovaldo spent his free half-day circling the bed of dirt with an absent air, keeping an eye on the street-cleaner in the distance and on the mushrooms, and calculating how much time they needed to ripen.”

“On his way to work each morning, Marcovaldo walked beneath the green foliage of a square with trees, a bit of public garden, isolated in the junction of four streets.”

“He raised his eyes among the boughs of the horse-chestnuts, where they were at their thickest and allowed yellow rays only to glint in the shade transparent with sap; and he listened to the racket of the sparrows, tone-deaf, invisible on the branches.”

“His pillow clutched under his arm, he went for a stroll. He went and looked at the moon, which was full, big above tress and roofs. He came back towards the bench, giving it a fairly wide berth out of fear of disturbing them, but actually hoping to irritate them a little and persuade them to go away.”

“But by now Marcovaldo’s sleep had reached a zone where sounds no longer arrived, and these, even so graceless and rasping, came is if muffled in a soft halo, perhaps because of the very consistency of the garbage packed into the trucks. ”

“The routes birds follow, as they migrate southwards or northwards, in autumn or in spring, rarely cross the city. Their flights cleave the heavens high above the striped humps of fields and along the edge of woods...”

“Marcovaldo is a poor workman living in an industrial city in northern Italy during the 1950′s and ’60’s. The stories are placed within the book in a seasonal order; in other words, the first story takes place in Spring, the second in Summer, and so on, consecutively. ”

“Although he is a factory worker in an urban area, Marcovaldo ‘possessed an eye ill-suited to city life,’ and is always noticing the signs of nature in his environment, “discovering the changes of season, the yearnings of his heart, and the woes of his existence”

“Where Marcovaldo himself is thrilled by nature, his children, who are thoroughly urban, seem to misunderstand any references to natural things.”