I. Frost's Selected Quotations

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It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear
Italo Calvino

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 Calvino

In politics, as in every other sphere of life, there are two important principles for a man of any sense: don't cherish too many illusions, and never stop believing that every little bit helps
Italo Calvino

Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents
Italo Calvino

Humanity reaches as far as love reaches; it has no frontiers except those we give it
Italo Calvino

Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst.
Italo Calvino

Everyone knows those moments when you seem to understand everything; perhaps the next moment you try to define what you've understood and it all vanishes
Italo Calvino

When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign - a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don't want to hear the word mentioned
Italo Calvino

Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have
Italo Calvino

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.
Italo Calvino

There are two ways not to suffer from the inferno we are all living in every day. The first suits most people: accept the inferno and become part of it to the point where you don't even see it any more. The second is riskier and requires constant attention and willingness to learn: seek out and know how to recognize whoever and whatever, in the midst of the inferno, is not inferno, and help them last, give them space
Italo Calvino

Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words
Italo Calvino

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

In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision
Italo Calvino

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

The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions.
Italo Calvino

The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts
Italo Calvino

I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume.
Italo Calvino

We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly
Italo Calvino

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

The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to concern himself with the world that repels him
Italo Calvino

Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.
Italo Calvino

The art of writing tales consists in an ability to draw the rest of life from the nothing one has understood of it, but life begins again at the end of the pages when one realises that one knew nothing whatsoever
Italo Calvino

I'm producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell or who knows may already have told on some other occasion
Italo Calvino

What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.
Italo Calvino

The thing that most exasperates you is to find yourself at the mercy of the fortuitous, the aleatory, the random, in things and in human actions-carelessness, approximation, imprecision, whether your own or others
Italo Calvino

You fight with the dreams as with formless and meaningless life, seeking a pattern, a route that surely must be there
Italo Calvino

The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.
Italo Calvino

Void, separation, and waiting, that's what we are
Italo Calvino

I set my hand to the art of writing early on. Publishing was easy for me, and I at once found favor and understanding. But it was a long time before I realized and convinced myself that this was anything but mere chance.
Italo Calvino

Your first book already defines you, while you are really far from being defined. And this definition is something you may then carry with you for the rest of your life, trying to confirm it or extend or correct or deny it; but you can never eliminate it.
Italo Calvino

Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased
Italo Calvino

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb
Italo Calvino