Italo Calvino

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

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

“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.”

“Memory really matters... only if it binds together the imprint of the past and the project of the future.”

“The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand.”

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

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

“Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.”

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

“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had.”

“A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.”

“My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight.”

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

“The catalog of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born.”

“To write is to always hide something so that it is discovered.”

“You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living.”