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Book: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Quotes of Book: If on a Winter's Night a
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  1. Italo Calvino _ If on a Winter's Night a

    Don't ask where the rest of this book is!" It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. "All books continue in the beyond...
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  2. Italo Calvino _ If on a Winter's Night a

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

    Today each of you is the object of the other's reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.
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  4. Italo Calvino _ If on a Winter's Night a

    It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.
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  5. Italo Calvino _ If on a Winter's Night a

    The novels that attract me most... are those that create an illusion of transperancy around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel and perverse as possible.
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  6. Italo Calvino _ If on a Winter's Night a

    …we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.
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  7. Italo Calvino _ If on a Winter's Night a

    I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read," a third reader says, "but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment. At other moments, on the contrary, I seem to retain the memory of the readings of a single book one next to another, enthusiastic or cold or hostile, scattered in time without a perspective, without a thread that ties them together. The conclusion I have reached is that reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext.
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  8. Italo Calvino _ If on a Winter's Night a

    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 again with her through the channel dug by others' words, which, as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and hers, a language, a code between the two of you, a means to exchange signals and recognize each other.
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  9. Italo Calvino _ If on a Winter's Night a

    Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do,' Arkadian Porpirych says. 'What statistic allows one to identify the nations where literature enjoys true consideration better than the sums appropriated for controlling it and suppressing it? Where it is the object of such attentions, literature gains an extraordinary authority, inconceivable in countries where it is allowed to vegetate as an innocuous pastime, without risks.
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  10. Italo Calvino _ If on a Winter's Night a

    Lovers' reading of each other's bodies {of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together} differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeat itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives. But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against moments, recovering time?
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  11. Italo Calvino _ If on a Winter's Night a

    Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.
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  12. Italo Calvino _ If on a Winter's Night a

    To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in a place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished.
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