Italo Calvino Quotes

It's interesting to think about the different forms one place can take.

When you're in a place, the details you focus on are different than details you focus on when you're writing about it.

Everything is as it was, I discover when I reach my destination, and everything has changed.

I used to hate L.A., but I met such a great group of people there that I fell in love with it.

Fame for me is like a place, a country I'm taking a tour through.

I really liked falling in love with cities that I had actively disliked before.

To put off the inevitable, we try to fix the city in place, remember it as it was, doing to the city what we would never allow to be done to ourselves. . . . New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.

Perhaps someday you can have one city as easy to see as Illusions and as hard to forget as Reality.

As one gets older, one discovers everything is going to be exactly the same with different hats on.

Time is a wonderful storyteller.

San Francisco isn't what it used to be, and it never was.

Caen's San Francisco may not be the city we remember, but it is the city we want to remember.

What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

Things may look different to you than they did before. I've had that experience myself. But don't let appearances fool you. There's only one reality.

Repetition doesn't really exist

What kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be.

The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.

History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.

Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long.

I liked the place I came from. But a lot of what I liked about it was that I had come from there.

For some strange reason, no matter where I go, the place is always called "here".

Men... look back on the children who were once themselves, and attempt to reconstruct them. But they can no longer think like the child.

I suppose frogs pay no attention to being frogs. They take it for granted. What interests a frog are differences among frogs. From our point of view they are more or less the same, from their point of view they are all radically different.

Also, where does your identity come from? Your memory, of course.

We are not apt to think of the importance of events as they transpire with us, but we feel the importance of them afterwards.