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"Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
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"You see a wile, you thwart. Am I right?"

"So we get a plan," I said. "Any suggestions?""Blow up the building," Kincaid said without looking up. "That works good for vampires. Then soak what's left in gasoline. Set it on fire. Then blow it all up again.""For future reference, I was sort of hoping for a suggestion that didn't sound like it came from that Bolshevik Muppet with all the dynamite."

"If someone offer you an opportunity to get closer to your enemy, you always take it."

"Relationships with your enemies; you need to cultivate those, because: "Only true enemies stab you in the front."

"Leo frowned at the giant's spire. "Can't we blow it up or something?""Without me, you do not have the power," Hera said. "You might as well try to destroy a mountain.""Done that once today," Jason said."

"A general is like a writer who wants to write a play, or a book, but whom the book itself, with the unexpected options that it reveals at one point, the impasse it presents at another, causes to deviate extensively from his preconceived plan."

"Fish rule the waters, but can be caught using worms. Birds rule the air, but can be caught using grain."
Explore more quotes by Italo Calvino

"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."

"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'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."

"But Ludmilla is always at least one step ahead of you. 'I like to know that book exists that I will still be able to read she says, sure that existent objects, concrete albeit unknown, must correspond to the strength of her desire. How can you keep up with her, this woman who is always reading another book besides the one before her eyes, a book that does not yet exist, but which, since she wants it, cannot fail to exist?"

"Because in this way all I did was to accumulate past after past behind me, multiplying the pasts, and if one life was too dense and ramified and embroiled for me to bear it always with me, imagine so many lives, each with its own past and the pasts of the other lives that continue to become entangled one with the others."
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