# Italo Calvino - Quotes: 10 - Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/italo-calvino ## Books - [Cosmicomics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/italo-calvino/cosmicomics.md) — 2 quotes - [If on a Winter's Night a Traveler](https://www.leafyquotes.com/italo-calvino/if-on-a-winters-night-a-traveler.md) — 4 quotes - [Invisible Cities](https://www.leafyquotes.com/italo-calvino/invisible-cities.md) — 4 quotes ## Recently added quotes > Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/italo-calvino/if-on-a-winters-night-a-traveler/reading-is-going.md) > 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. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/italo-calvino/if-on-a-winters-night-a-traveler/if-one-wanted.md) > 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. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/italo-calvino/invisible-cities/the-inferno-of-the.md) > "Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me." > > Polo answers: "Without stones there is no arch." p. 82 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/italo-calvino/invisible-cities/why-do-you.md) > Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/italo-calvino/if-on-a-winters-night-a-traveler/dont-be-amazed.md) > 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: [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/italo-calvino/if-on-a-winters-night-a-traveler/in-the-shop.md) > As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. (di quest'onda che rifluisce dai ricordi la città s'imbeve coma una spugna e si dilata). The city, however, does not tell of its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand... p. 10 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/italo-calvino/invisible-cities/as-this-wave.md) > With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. p. 44 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/italo-calvino/invisible-cities/with-cities-it.md) > And he waves the pages of the papers, black and white the way space was when the galaxies were being formed, and crammed—as space was then—with isolated corpuscles, surrounded by emptiness, containing no destination or meaning. And I think how beautiful it was then, through that void, to draw lines and parabolas, pick out the precise point, the intersection between space and time where the event would spring forth, undeniable in the prominence of its glow; whereas now events come flowing down without interruption, like cement being poured, one column next to the other, one within the other, separated by black and incongruous headlines.... [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/italo-calvino/cosmicomics/and-he-waves.md) > And in that moment we all thought of the space that her round arms would occupy moving backward and forward with the rolling pin over the dough, her bosom leaning over the great mound of flour and eggs, [...] and we thought of the space the flour would occupy, and the wheat for the flour, and the fields to raise the wheat, and the mountains from which the water would flow to irrigate the fields; [...] of the space it would take for the Sun to arrive with its rays, to ripen the wheat; of the space for the Sun to condense from the clouds of stellar gases and burn; of the quantities of stars and galaxies and galactic masses in flight through space which would be needed to hold suspended every galaxy, every nebula, every sun, every planet, and at the same time we thought of it, this space was inevitably being formed, at the same time that Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0 was uttering those words: "… ah, what noodles, boys!" the point that contained her and all of us was expanding in a halo of distance in light-years and light-centuries and billions of light-millennia, and we were being hurled to the four corners of the universe, [...] and she, dissolved into I don't know what kind of energy-light-heat, she, Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0, she who in the midst of our closed, petty world had been capable of a generous impulse, "Boys, the noodles I would make for you!," a true outburst of general love, initiating at the same moment the concept of space and, properly speaking, space itself, and time, and universal gravitation, and the gravitating universe, making possible billions and billions of suns, and of planets, and fields of wheat, and Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0s, scattered through the continents of the planets, kneading with floury, oil-shiny, generous arms, and she lost at that very moment, and we, mourning her loss. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/italo-calvino/cosmicomics/and-in-that.md)