Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.
The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.
Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
If a lover is wretched who invokes kisses of which he knows not the flavor, a thousand times more wretched is he who has had a taste of the flavor and then had it denied him.
There is no language without deceit.
At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.
Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.
It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible.
You’ll understand when you’ve forgotten what you understood before.
Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.
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.
Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand.
In politics, as in every other sphere of life, there are two important principles for a man of any sense: don’t cherish too many illusions, and never stop believing that every little bit helps.
How well I would write if I were not here!
A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.
The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.
What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one’s nose, taking shortcuts.
The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to concern himself with the world that repels him.