One reads alone, even in another's presence.

- Italo Calvino

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

- Italo Calvino

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

- Italo Calvino

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

- Italo Calvino

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…

- Italo Calvino

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

- Italo Calvino

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…

- Italo Calvino

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

- Italo Calvino

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…

- Italo Calvino