The minute you start saying something, 'Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!' you are already close to view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore, in order really to live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second to madness.

Italo Calvino

Categorized in : Thinking Order Beautiful

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

perspective cities dream

A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.

Italo Calvino

casual and-love people

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

Italo Calvino

literature book art

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.

Italo Calvino

events lasts order

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.

Italo Calvino

space giving two

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.

Italo Calvino

known able

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

Italo Calvino

information ifs book

I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.

Italo Calvino

cities stories people

Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don't mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification.

Italo Calvino

dream mean believe

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

Italo Calvino

exile natural travel

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

Italo Calvino

contemplating mirrors knows

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.

Italo Calvino

library style book

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.

Italo Calvino

distance clouds travel

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

Italo Calvino

communication voice stories

If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.

Italo Calvino

distance light eye

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

Italo Calvino

evening fantasy rain

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.

Italo Calvino

men two believe

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

Italo Calvino

cities hands past

This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts bring with it consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it. . . .

Italo Calvino

zero mean moving

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.

Italo Calvino

finals mother world