A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of o….

You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst..

You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before.

One reads alone, even in another's presence..

Memories images, once they are fixed in words, are erased..

The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner..

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedi….

Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don't mean escaping into dreams or into t….

The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves.

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler..

You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expr….

It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cr….

You have with you the book you were reading in the cafe, which you are eager to continue, so that you can then hand it on to her, to communicate agai….

How well I would write if I were not here!.

Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be..

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say..

Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhap….

They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had alwa….

...and every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns ….

A person's life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the….

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand.