“You explode, if that's more to your taste, shoot yourself all around in endless darts, be prodigal, spendthrift, reckless: I shall implode, collapse inside the abyss of myself, towards my buried centre, infinitely.”
― Italo Calvino, quote from The Complete Cosmicomics
“time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.”
― Italo Calvino, quote from The Complete Cosmicomics
“Now the situation is different, I admit: I have a wristwatch, I compare the angle of its hands with the angle of all the hands I see; I have an engagement book where the hours of my business appointments are marked down; I have a chequebook on whose stubs I add and subtract numbers. At Penn Station I get off the train, I take the subway, I stand and grasp the strap with one hand to keep my balance while I hold the newspaper up in the other, folded so I can glance over the figures of the stock market quotations: I play the game, in other words, the game of pretending there's an order in the dust, a regularity in the system, or an interpretation of different systems, incongruous but still measurable, so that every graininess of disorder coincides with the faceting of an order which promptly crumbles.”
― Italo Calvino, quote from The Complete Cosmicomics
“We were still in the boundless void, striped here and there by a streak or two of hydrogen around the vortexes of the first constellations. I admit it required very complicated deductions to foresee the Mesopotamian plains black with men and horses and arrows and trumpets, but, since I had nothing else to do, I could bring it off.”
― Italo Calvino, quote from The Complete Cosmicomics
“When you’ve waited two hundred million years, you can also wait six hundred;”
― Italo Calvino, quote from The Complete Cosmicomics
“This is why, rather than go on talking, I felt the need to transform the things to be said into a cone of light hurled at a hundred miles an hour, to transform myself into this cone of light moving over the superhighway, because it is certain that such a signal can be received and understood by her without being lost in the ambiguous disorder of secondary vibrations, just as I, to receive and understand the things she has to say to me, would like them to be only (rather, I would like her to be only) this cone of light I see advancing on the superhighway at a speed (I'm guessing, at a glance) of eighty or ninety. What counts is communicating the indispensable, skipping all the superfluous, reducing ourselves to essential communication, to a luminous signal that moves in a given direction, abolishing the complexity of our personalities and situations and facial expressions, leaving them in the shadowy container that the headlights carry behind them and conceal. The Y I love is really that moving band of luminous rays, and all the rest of her can remain implicit; and the me that she can love, the me that has the power of entering that circuit of exaltation which is her affective life, in the flashing of this pass which, through love of her and with a certain risk, I am now attempting.”
― Italo Calvino, quote from The Complete Cosmicomics
“... before, we swam, and now we are swum.”
― Italo Calvino, quote from The Complete Cosmicomics
“Imagine I can see her, her or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand different vistas, she who makes the Moon and, whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them.”
― Italo Calvino, quote from The Complete Cosmicomics
“If I love order, it's not the mark of a character subjected to an inner discipline, a repression of the instincts. In me the idea of an absolutely regular world, symmetrical and methodical, is associated with that first impulse and burgeoning of nature.
The rest of your images that associate passion with disorder, love with intemperate overflow - river fire whirlpool volcano - are for me memories of nothingness and listlessness and boredom.”
― Italo Calvino, quote from The Complete Cosmicomics
“Let me make one thing clear: this theory that the universe, after having reached an extremity of rarefaction, will be condensed again has never convinced me. And yet many of us are counting only on that, continually making plans for the time when we’ll all be back there again.”
― Italo Calvino, quote from The Complete Cosmicomics
“I knew that signs also allow others to judge the one who makes them, and that in the course of a galactic year tastes and ideas have time to change, and the way of regarding the earlier ones depends on what comes afterwards; in short, I was afraid a sign that now might seem perfect to me, in two hundred or six hundred million years would make me look absurd.”
― Italo Calvino, quote from The Complete Cosmicomics
“There is still, in fact, in Calvino’s archive a drawer full of newspaper cuttings concerning scientific discoveries. As”
― Italo Calvino, quote from The Complete Cosmicomics
“If one starts to draw comparisons between what is and what is not, it is the poorer qualities of the former that strike you, the impurities, the flaws; in short, you can only really feel safe with nothingness.”
― Italo Calvino, quote from The Complete Cosmicomics
“We were peering into this darkness, crisscrossed with voices, when the change took place: the only real, great change I've ever happened to witness, and compared to it the rest is nothing”
― Italo Calvino, quote from The Complete Cosmicomics
“The only contact we could have with the void was through this little the void had produced as quintessence of its own emptiness; the only image we had of the void was our own poor universe. All the void we would ever know was there, in the relativity of what is, for even the void had been no more than a relative void,a void secretly shot with veins and temptations to be something, given that in a moment of crisis at its own nothingness it had been able to give rise to the universe.”
― Italo Calvino, quote from The Complete Cosmicomics
“...she, Mrs. Ph(i)Nk₀, she who in the midst of our closed petty world had been capable of a generous impulse, 'Boys, the tagliatelle 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, quote from The Complete Cosmicomics
Italo Calvino
Born place: in Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba
Born date October 15, 1923
See more on GoodReads
“I want you any way I can get you. Not because you’re beautiful or clever or kind or adorable, although devil knows you’re all those things. I want you because there’s no one else like you, and I don’t ever want to start a day without seeing you.”
― Lisa Kleypas, quote from Tempt Me at Twilight
“For the first time in my life I had received an assurance that I had been of use to someone on this earth, and my astonishment at the thought that I, a commonplace, unsophisticated young officer, should really have the power to make someone else so happy knew no bounds.”
― Stefan Zweig, quote from Beware of Pity
“Some legends say that Hera's breast milk sprayed across the sky and created the Milky Way. I don't know. That seems like a whole lot of solar systems from just one squirt”
― Rick Riordan, quote from Percy Jackson's Greek Heroes
“I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, quote from Between the World and Me
“Kami memang orang miskin. Di mata orang kota kemiskinan itu kesalahan. Lupa mereka lauk yg dimakannya itu kerja kami.”
― Pramoedya Ananta Toer, quote from House of Glass
The Avery Shaw Exper...
Of Things Gone Astra...
The Purge of Babylon
Volition
The Valley of Amazem...
Wolf in White VanBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
