Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvinowas an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy, the Cosmicomics collection of short stories, and the novels Invisible Citiesand If on a winter's night a traveler...
NationalityItalian
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth15 October 1923
CountryItaly
cat men animal
The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.
flower eye winter
You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger's passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are.
communication voice stories
It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
travel natural foreigners
The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
mirrors contemplating knows
The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves
memories cities venice
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.
cities lost quarters
The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.
travel distance dust
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.
book information ifs
Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?
art book literature
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
order lasts events
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.
two space giving
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
rain evening fantasy
I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.
race break-off two
The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest-for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both-must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.