The novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible.
Italo CalvinoRead
If a lover is wretched who invokes kisses of which he knows not the flavor, a thousand times more wretched is he who has had a taste of the flavor and then had it denied him.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the pain of yearning and the deeper sorrow of having experienced love and then losing it.
Italo Calvino highlights the profound sadness that comes from love, suggesting that while those who have never experienced genuine affection suffer, it is those who have tasted love and lost it who endure a much greater sorrow. This quote captures the idea that the memory of love can be a haunting reminder of happiness lost, creating a more intense emotional struggle.
Themes
LoveSorrowYearningLossEmotion
In practice
Example use cases
A speaker at a wedding could quote this to emphasize the value of love and the pain that can accompany it.
More from Italo Calvino
All quotes →Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap; the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then or never again.
Italo CalvinoRead
...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 are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady's perfume in his jailbird's suit. And I'm left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells.
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Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
Italo CalvinoRead
The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
Italo CalvinoRead
Fantasy is like jam. . . . You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing . . . out of which you can’t make anything.
Italo CalvinoRead
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