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"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."
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"Life is an intricate play with actors waiting for an explanation. Each added act confers a new interpretation of the story. ['Waiting for the pieces to fall into place']"
"By freeze-framing the image of our lifestyle, by stopping our mental clock at times and letting time flow, 'psychological' time can replace 'chronological' time and our human condition can be called into question. This opens the door to a new challenge and a new future. ['Svp "ArrAat sur image']"
"And the great owners, who had become through the might of their holdings both more and less than men."
"Everything is true,' he said. 'Everything anybody has ever thought.''Will you be all right?''I'll be all right,' he said, and thought, And I'm going to die. Both those are true, too."
"If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others."
"We human beings are created and yet we are more rational than the creator himself who spawned us."
"Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it."
"When God broke his deal with me, I turned to the Devil. In the end, I wasn't happy. I realized that the imagination of a perfect being was more limited than that of the imperfect one. Color me unimpressed by the Actus Purus."
"Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that of all the information passed by our cultural assets it is precisely the elements which might be of the greatest importance to us and which have the task of solving the riddles of the universe and of reconciling us to the sufferings of life -- it is precisely those elements that are the least well authenticated of any."
"Something has happened to our intelligence. My reasoning is this: arrangements of part of the Brain is a language. We are parts of the Brain; therefore, we are language. Why, then, do we not know this?"
Explore more quotes by Italo Calvino
"Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement."
"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."
"He was staring hard, not at his wife and me but at his daughter watching us. In his cold pupil, in the firm twist of his lips, was reflected Madame Miyagi's orgasm reflected in her daughter's gaze."
"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."
"And meanwhile the Galaxy ran through space and left behind those signs old and new and I still hadn't found mine."
"It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the sparks that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances."
"The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss."
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