top of page
"Reading is solitude."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Solitude quotes

"To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion? There is nobody-here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone."

"The old gal was only another lonely creature in a world that didn't care."

"I had gotten so used to being alone, but never entirely used to it. Never used to it enough to stop wanting the alternative."

"I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude."

"I love my loneliness as it helps me gather strength to deal with people."

"He sat beside the window in the dark, with his eyes closed. Hearing to the sound of the rain. The whisky in his glass burnt his throat, while the smoke of his cigarette filled his lungs and the fire inside his heart consumed his soul slowly."
Explore more quotes by Italo Calvino

"The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to concern himself with the world that repels him."

"The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins."

"Journeys to relive your past?' was the Khan's question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: 'Journeys to recover your future?'And Marco's answer was: 'Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and willnever have."

"The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, 'I read, therefore it writes."

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

"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. If this is not the case, then humanity becomes - as it is already to a large extent - no more than a rabbit-warren. But this is no longer a 'free-range warren but a 'battery one, in the conditions of artificiality in which it lives, with artificial light and chemical feed."

"Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they area dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books."

"Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

"Today each of you is the object of the other's reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story."
bottom of page