Italo Calvino Quotes

Memory was a curse, yes, he thought, but it was also the greatest gift. Because if you lost memory you lost everything.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.

...the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power or memory is never heard, never described or passed on.

Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.

The calendar has a magic that makes us imagine a memory can be resurrected and revived, but nothing returns.

This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. To-day we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.

The French say that to part is to die a little. To be forgotten too is to die a little. It is to lose some of the links that anchor us to the rest of humanity.

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

It wasn't that I forgot Hanna. But at a certain point the memory of her stopped accompanying me wherever I went. She stayed behind, the way a city stays behind as a train pulls out of the station. It's there, somewhere behind you, and you could go back and make sure of it. But why should you?

How that name comes up. Mixing memory and desire

Recalling, for me, is a great way of living, so not to forget.

The strands are all there; to the memory nothing is ever lost.

Letters are just pieces of paper," I said. "Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.

We fell silent again. The thing we had shared was nothing more than a fragment of time that had died longe ago.Even so, a faint glimmer of that warm memory still claimed a part of my heart. And when death claim me, no doubt I would walk along by that faint light in the brief instant before being flung once again into the abyss of nothingness

Your life is what you remember. I mean, some things I wish I still had. But it doesn't matter.

People try to keep their past, like kind of holding on to their past. Every Springsteen song talks about that.

The West is dead... you may lose a sweetheart but you won't forget her.

When you begin to think about the past, you realize how much of it is lost to us.

The near stillness recalls what is forgotten, extinct angels.

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

Memory is this one attempt to not be erased by time. And I think that ties back to what I learned watching my grandmother lose her memories is, you know, we are all facing erasure eventually.

Our memory is and always will be as good as time travel gets, and in the meantime time will do the travelling for us.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.