Italo Calvino citáty

„Má tvář Botticelliho Venuše, a její tělo je jedinečná symfonie.“

—  Italo Calvino

o Silvaně Manganové
Zdroj: [GESTORBEN - Silvana Mangano, spiegel.de, 1989-12-25, 2015-06-17, http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13499212.html]

„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.“

—  Italo Calvino, kniha Cosmicomics

Pages 46-47, "All at One Point".
Cosmicomics (1965)

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

—  Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

Zdroj: The Uses of Literature

„Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.“

—  Italo Calvino

„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.“

—  Italo Calvino, kniha Invisible Cities

Zdroj: Invisible Cities

„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.“

—  Italo Calvino, kniha Invisible Cities

Page 44.
Zdroj: Invisible Cities (1972)
Kontext: 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.

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

—  Italo Calvino

Zdroj: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

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

—  Italo Calvino, kniha Invisible Cities

Zdroj: Invisible Cities

„One reads alone, even in another's presence.“

—  Italo Calvino

Zdroj: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

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

—  Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

Zdroj: The Uses of Literature

„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.“

—  Italo Calvino, kniha Invisible Cities

Zdroj: Invisible Cities

„Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.“

—  Italo Calvino

Zdroj: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

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

—  Italo Calvino

„The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.“

—  Italo Calvino

„Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.“

—  Italo Calvino, kniha Invisible Cities

Zdroj: Invisible Cities

„The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.“

—  Italo Calvino

„The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.“

—  Italo Calvino

„Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.“

—  Italo Calvino, kniha Invisible Cities

Zdroj: Invisible Cities

„Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.“

—  Italo Calvino, kniha Invisible Cities

Zdroj: Invisible Cities