Italo Calvino Quotes - Page 2

That wish to enter into an elusive element which had urged Cosimo into the trees, was still working now inside him unsatisfied, making him long for a more intimate link, a relationship which would bind him to each leaf and twig and feather and flutter.

We'll make an army in the trees and bring the earth and the people on it to their senses.

...the world was trying to change its old face and show its underbelly of earth and roots.

Wciąż są w ruchu te same przedmioty, przechodząc z jednego obozu do innego, czy z jednego pułku do innego w tym samym obozie; czymże zresztą innym jest w ogóle wojna, jeśli nie przechodzeniem z rąk do rąk dobytku coraz bardziej sponiewieranego?

Wojna to trochę rzeźnia, a trochę rutyna i nie ma co czepiać się zanadto szczegółów.

Jego [cesarza] zadanie to prowadzić tę wojnę, która w danej chwili się toczy, i co najwyżej pomyśleć jeszcze o następnej.

To fall asleep like a bird. To have a wing you could stick your head under, a
world of branches suspended above the earthly world, barely glimpsed down
below, muffled and remote. Once you begin rejection your present state, there is no knowing where you can arrive.

...eyes that, like those of children, look at an eternal present without forgiveness.

It was the love which the hunter has for living things, and which he can only express by aiming his gun at them ...

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

Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.

Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end?" In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the 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.

To fall in the void as I fell: none of you knows what that means… I went down into the void, to the most absolute bottom conceivable, and once there I saw that the extreme limit must have been much, much farther below, very remote, and I went on falling, to reach it.