Italo Calvino Quotes, Thoughts and images

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

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

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

It is within you that the ghosts acquire voices.

You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before

The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.

A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.

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

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

...Life is nothing but trading smells.

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?

The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.

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

In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.

At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.

Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities.

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

Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.

Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie.

There is no language without deceit.

You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.

Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.

Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears.

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

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

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.