As Rimbaud dragged a dead man along he thought, ‘Oh corpse, I have come rushing here only to be dragged along by the heels like you. What is this frenzy that drives me, this mania for battle and for love, when seen from the place where your staring eyes gaze and your flung-back head knocks over stones? It’s that think of, oh corpse, it’s that you make me think of: but does anything change? Nothing. No other days exist but these of ours before the tomb, both for us the living and for you the dead. Mayst be granted me not to waste them, not to waste anything of what am, of what I could be: to do deeds helpful to the Frankish cause:to embrace, to be embraced by, proud Adamant. I hope you spent your days no worse, oh corpse. Anyway to you the dice have already shown their numbers. For me, they are still whirling in the box. And I love my own disquiet, corpse, not your peace.

— Italo Calvino

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.

— Italo Calvino

But Lyudmila 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?

— Italo Calvino

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.

— Italo Calvino

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasoning and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

— Italo Calvino

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 Amadeo, who at that moment would have paid anything rather than give up his novel, it seemed downright threatening.

— Italo Calvino

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.

— Italo Calvino

Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes.

— Italo Calvino

Every morning I tell myself, 'Today has to be productive' - and then something happens that prevents me from writing.

— Italo Calvino

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

— Italo Calvino