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"A person, for example, reads in adulthood a book that is important for him, and it makes him say, 'How could I have lived without reading it!' and also, 'What a pity I did not read it in my youth!' Well, these statements do not have much meaning, especially the second, because after he has read that book, his life becomes the life of a person who has read that book, and it is of little importance whether he read it early or late, because now his life before that reading also assumes a form shaped by that reading."
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"Reading doesn't mean accepting everything you read, it means reasoning everything you read."
"In fact, mistakes are life's way of teaching us the right way to do things."
"We often know information but not the epistemology of that information."
"Failure is the school of greatness."
"We are not perfect. We are here to learn. Earth is one big classroom and God is our heavenly guidance counselor and teacher."
"Experience is a master teacher, even when it's not our own."
"I don't recall that when I was in high school or college, any novel was ever presented to me to study as a novel. In fact, I was well on the way to getting a Master's degree in English before I really knew what fiction was, and I doubt if I would ever have learned then, had I not been trying to write it. I believe that it's perfectly possible to run a course of academic degrees in English and to emerge a seemingly respectable Ph.D. and still not know how to read fiction."
Explore more quotes by Italo Calvino
"In fact the problem Leopardi is facing is speculative and metaphysical, a problem in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Descartes and Kant: the relationship between the idea of infinity as absolute space and absolute time, and our empirical knowledge of space and time."
"Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?"
"It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books."
"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."
"Reading,' he says, 'is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead....''Or that is not present because it does not yet exist, something desire, feared, possible or impossible,' Ludmilla says. 'Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be...."
"The seventh reader interrupts you: 'Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could only end in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.'You stop for a moment to reflect on these words. Then, in a flash, you decide you want to marry Ludmilla."
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