Calvino

 1. If you want to know how dark it is around you, you have to look for the faint light in the distance. — *Invisible Cities*

　　2. I think: at some point in a person's life, more people they know will have died than will have lived. At that point, you will refuse to accept other faces and other expressions: every new face you meet will bear the imprint of an old mold; you have put a corresponding mask on each of them. — *Invisible Cities*

　　3. The purpose of the passage of time is only one: to allow feelings and thoughts to stabilize, mature, and be free from all haste or fleeting, accidental changes. — *A Literary Memorandum for the Next Millennium*

　　4. As time passed, I slowly came to understand that only what exists will disappear, whether it be a city, love, or parents. — *Invisible Cities*

　　5. Giving up everything is easier than people imagine; the difficulty lies in beginning. Once you give up something you thought was fundamental, you will find that you can give up other things, and then many more things. — *If on a Winter's Night a Traveler*

　　6. The dimension of time has been broken; we can only love and think in fragments of time, each fragment running along its own trajectory, disappearing in an instant. 7.

　　A city doesn't reveal its past; it hides it like the lines on a hand. It's written in the corners of streets and alleys, on window railings, stair railings, lightning rods, and flagpoles—every mark a scratch, a saw, a chisel, a blow. (From *Invisible Cities*)

　　8. Memory is also a burden; it turns various marks over and over to affirm the city's existence. The unseen landscape determines the seen landscape. (From *Invisible Cities*)

　　9. In that book, the philosopher said: "Even in the sorrowful city of Lyza, an invisible thread connects one life to another, then loosens, tightens between two moving points, and quickly sketches a new pattern. Thus, this unfortunate city contains a happy city at every moment, without even knowing its own existence." (From *Invisible Cities*)

　　10. Elsewhere is a mirror reflecting reality. The traveler can see how little he possesses, and how much he has never possessed and will never possess.

　　11. To see people on the ground clearly, you must keep your distance from the ground.

　　12. Falsehood is never in words, but in things themselves. (Invisible Cities)

　　13. "In the city of his dreams, he was young; but when he arrived in Isidora, he was old. In the square, there was a wall where old people sat watching the passing young people. He sat with these old people. The desires of the past were now memories." (Invisible Cities)

　　14. Your footsteps follow not what your eyes see, but what is inside you, buried, erased. There are many cities like Philid; they can evade all the staring gazes, but they cannot evade those unexpected ones. (Invisible Cities)

　　15. Memory is neither a fleeting, easily dispersed cloud nor a dry, transparent substance, but a scab formed on the surface of the city by charred life, a sponge soaked in the no longer flowing fluids of life, a jam made from the mixture of past, present, and future, calcifying and sealing away the existence in motion: this is what you discover at the end of your journey. *Invisible Cities*

　　16. Reading is abandoning all one's own intentions and prejudices, being ready to accept a sudden voice from an unknown source. This voice does not come from the book, not from the author, not from conventional language, but from the unspoken part, from the part of the objective world that has not yet been expressed and for which there are no suitable words. *If on a Winter's Night a Traveler*

　　17. You've traveled so far just to escape the burden of nostalgia! *Invisible Cities*

　　18. Once I passed through outer space, and I deliberately made a mark somewhere, hoping to find it again two hundred million years later when I returned… But at the very point where I left my mark, instead of a shapeless line, it appeared like a ripped wound in the shattered, broken space… I was frustrated and disappointed, as if dragged away for light-years without feeling.

　　19. Books and vows are not as valuable as a person's inherent worth. A person can write, but the soul may have already been lost. *The Nonexistent Knight*

　　20. Reading is a solitary act. She treats books like oyster shells, finding safety within them as if they were the oysters themselves. The room is enveloped by densely packed pages, like leaves filling every space in a dense forest. *If on a Winter's Night a Traveler*

　　21. How many people live in their own imagined cities, and then move to another city for their own imagination? This stubbornness is both endearing and pathetic. *Invisible Cities*

　　22. To those who travel but never enter the city, it appears one way; to those trapped within, it appears another. *Invisible Cities*

　　23. Every kind of life leaves you with some dissatisfaction. Is this dissatisfaction only satisfied when all dissatisfactions are combined? Everyone reads their own unwritten history in another person's eyes. Once you give up something you thought was fundamental, you'll find you can give up other things, and then many more things to give up. *If on a Winter's Night a Traveler*

　　24. The hell of the living will not appear; if it does, it is already here, in which we live every day, formed by our collective gathering. *Invisible Cities*

　　25. You carve a path through paper with a blade as you carve a path through words with thought, for reading is like advancing through a dense forest. *If on a Winter's Night a Traveler*

　　26. The longing for distant places, the emptiness, the anticipation—these thoughts themselves can endure, lasting longer than life. *The Baron in the Trees*

　　27. "The image in memory, once fixed by words, is erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I'm unwilling to tell the whole story of Venice for fear of losing her all at once. Or perhaps, as I tell the stories of other cities, I'm already losing her little by little." *Invisible Cities*

　　28. "What he seeks is always ahead, and even the past changes with his journey, because the traveler's past changes with the path he takes: not the recent past that adds a day with each passing day, but a more distant past. Each time he arrives at a new city, the traveler rediscovers a past he didn't know: your former self that no longer exists, or something you've lost sovereignty over—this mutated feeling lurks in the unclaimed foreign land, waiting for you." *Invisible Cities*

　　29. "Are you traveling to return to your past?" The Khan's question could also be: "Are you traveling to find your future?" Marco's answer is: Other places are a mirror reflecting the opposite. The traveler can see how little he possesses, and how much he has never possessed and will never possess.

　　30. From one side to the other, the city's various images constantly double, but without depth, only two sides: like a sheet of paper with pictures on both sides, the two pictures can neither be separated nor viewed side by side. — *Invisible Cities*

　　31. Sometimes, whatever I see, I feel is full of meaning. I find it difficult to convey these meanings to others, difficult to describe them, or difficult to translate them into language. That's why I think the meaning contained in external things is very important; it's a hint or warning to myself and to the whole world. For me, this meaning is not external things, but phenomena occurring deep within my heart; for the world, it indicates these things not as isolated events, but as universal phenomena. There is no other way to explain these things than through certain signs, and you will surely understand my difficulty. — *If on a Winter's Night a Traveler*

　　32. Life is outside, outside the window, outside yourself. You seem to be able to no longer hide yourself in the lines of your writing, but you are powerless to open a new world, you cannot jump out. Perhaps this is better; if you can write happily, not because God has shown you miracles, nor because God has bestowed favor upon you, but because of sin, madness, and pride, then have I now escaped their entanglement? No, I have not become a complete person through writing; I have merely used it to while away some melancholy youth. (The Nonexistent Knight)

　　33. A cause based on some inner, persistent pursuit should be carried out quietly and inconspicuously. A person who publicizes or boasts about it will appear foolish, mindless, or even despicable. (The Collected Works of Italo Calvino)

　　34. When I have more ideas than others, I offer them to others. If they accept them, that is command. *The Baron in the Trees*

　　35. A city is like a dream, built of hope and fear, though its storylines are implicit, its patterns absurd, its perspective deceptive, and everything hides something else. What you love about a city is not its seven or seventy wonders, but the answers it gives to your questions, or the questions it poses that force you to answer, like Thebes asking questions through the Sphinx. *Invisible Cities*

　　36. “The hell of the living will not appear; if it does, it is already here, in which we live every day, formed by our collective existence. There are two ways to avoid suffering. For many, the first is easy to accept: accept hell, become part of it, until you no longer feel its presence; the second is risky, requiring constant vigilance and learning: seek out the people and things that are not in hell within hell, learn to discern them, let them exist, give them space.”

　　37. It is meaningless to categorize a city as happy or unhappy. There should be two other categories: one is cities that, despite the vicissitudes of time, still allow desire to define their appearance; the other is cities that have either suppressed desire or been suppressed by it. *Invisible Cities*

　　38. Chroy, this most chaste city, is constantly driven by lust. If men and women begin to realize their fleeting dreams, every ghost will become human, enacting a story of pursuit, hypocrisy, misunderstanding, conflict, and oppression, and the carousel of fantasy will stop turning. *Invisible Cities*

　　39. They can evade all the gazes of the eye, but they cannot evade those unexpected glances. *Invisible Cities*

　　40. And she said, "You don't think love is absolute devotion, giving up oneself..." But he said, "There can be no love if you don't feel full of power." *The Baron in the Trees*

　　41. In any case, your dice have shown their numbers. My dice are still jumping in the box. *The Nonexistent Knight*

　　42. The days in Telalba passed like this, our feelings became gray and numb, because we were bewildered between the same inhuman evil and morality. *The Calvino Collection*

　　43. "For that woman," Arcadian Porfiric continued, finding you listening very carefully to his words, "reading is to abandon all one's own intentions and prejudices, to be ready at any time to receive a sudden voice from an unknown source. This voice does not come from the book, not from the author, not from conventional words, but from the unspoken part, from the part of the objective world that has not yet been expressed and for which there are no suitable words." As for his viewpoint, he hoped to prove that behind the words lies emptiness, and the world exists only in forgery, counterfeiting, misunderstanding, and lies.

　　44. Coming to Ophelia is not just for trade, but also to sit around the bonfires lit around the market after nightfall, on sacks or barrels, or lying on stacks of carpets, listening to the words spoken by others, such as "wolf," "sister," "hidden treasure," "battle," "scabies," "lover," etc. Everyone around the bonfire must tell a story about a wolf, a sister, hidden treasure, battle, scabies, or a lover.

　　45. On the map of your empire, great Khan, you should be able to find both the Great Phidiras built of stone and the Little Phidiras in glass spheres. This is not because they are equally real, but because they are equally imagined. The former fixes what is accepted as necessary, but is not actually necessary; the latter seals off what is imagined as possible, but is no longer possible in an instant.