“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
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― Brando Skyhorse, quote from The Madonnas of Echo Park
“Blame was a luxury they could no longer afford.”
― Lisi Harrison, quote from Where There's a Wolf, There's a Way
“A really frustrating part was realizing that being boy crazy wasn’t even a worthwhile pastime. You can’t be boy crazy if no boy would ever be crazy for a girl like you. You can’t fantasize about your first kiss if you can’t even imagine that a boy—any boy—would kiss you.”
― Andie Mitchell, quote from It Was Me All Along
“The room was modern, but there was something about the arrangement of so much gleaming steel, the careful placement on the counters of jars and dishes, that looked timeless.”
― Sharon J. Bolton, quote from Now You See Me
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