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"Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears."
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"The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second."
"Time is inexplicable because it moves " clicks away " at steady increments, while increasing the past and bringing the future into the present. Time has a necessary affinity with both heaven and the earthly reality. 'Pythagoras, when he was asked what time was, answered that it is the soul of the world.' Plato said that time and heaven must be coexistent. Without time nothing can be created or generated in the universe, nor is anything intelligible without eternity. Time is no accident or affection, but the cause, power, and principle of the symmetry and order that confines all created beings, by which the animated nature of the universe moves."
"If you want to know the value of a minute ask the person who came to the train station or airport a minute late."
"You may need an additional money to make things happen and have it, but you can have an additional time anywhere. Value your time; as you wait, it is passing!"
Explore more quotes by Italo Calvino
"What he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places."
"Don't you ever get tired of reading?' she asked. 'You could hardly be called good company! Don't you know that, with women, you're supposed to make conversation?' she added; her half smile was perhaps meant to be ironic, though to Amedeo, who at that moment would have paid anything rather than give up his novel, it seemed downright threatening."
"This is the paradox of the power of literature: it seems that only when it is persecuted does it show its true powers, challenging authority, whereas in our permissive society it feels that it is being used merely to create the occasional pleasing contrast to the general ballooning of verbiage."
"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Tell the others right away, 'No, I don't want to watch TV! I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!"
"Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered; because the truth that can come from my pen is like a shard that has been chipped from a great boulder by a violent impact, then flung far away; because there is no certitude outside falsification."
"I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather:that man is called 'I' and you know nothing else about him, just as this station is called only 'station' and beyond it there exists nothing except the unanswered signal of a telephone ringing in a dark room of a distant city."
"Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours. or to the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx."
"I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."
"I'm accustomed to thinking of literature as a search for knowledge; in order to move onto existential terrain I need to consider it in relation to anthropology, ethnology, and mythology."
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