Italo Calvino Quotes

I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.

It's odd how people waiting for you stand out far less clearly than people you are waiting for.

Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.

I have no clue why, but maybe sometimes when there's someone you don't hear from, it's the person you want to hear from the most.

I think there's a lot of similarity between what people try to do with religion with what they want from art. In fact, I very specifically think that they are same thing. Not that religion and art are the same, but that they both tap into the same need we have for surrender.

I am never going to be able to rest easy in having established a posthumous connection to my father. I'll always be groping for what I can't have.

At first, not having Mina with us made us all feel lonely, and there was an emptiness without her. However, Mina is trying her best to participate, so even when she's not with us in person, she's still always with us in spirit.

You want to know what I was thinking?...I was thinking that I wished you'd been with me the last couple of days. I mean, I enjoyed getting to know everyone better. We ate lunch together, and the dinner last night was a lot of fun, but it just felt like something was wrong, like I was missing something. It wasn't until I saw you walking up the beach that I realized it was you.

Separated lovers cheat absence by a thousand fancies which have their own reality. They are prevented from seeing one another and they cannot write; nevertheless they find countless mysterious ways of corresponding, by sending each other the song of birds, the scent of flowers, the laughter of children.

But his face had that hollow look, as if there was something gone... you know that look. The inward focus. Distantly attentive to the home you're missing, or the someone you're missing. That look that a bird has when it turns it dry reptilian eye on you. That look that doesn't see you because the mind is filled up with someone it would rather see.

Once a person knows a kiss and a kind word, you can't blame him for never wanting to live without them again. - "The Bridges of Madison County"

Absence, the highest form of presence.

The distance that the dead have gone Does not at first appear- Their coming back seems possible For many an ardent year.

Places that are empty of you are empty of life.

I miss you so much your absence causes me, at times, accute pain. I don't mean sexually. I mean in connection with my writing.

But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

Love can isolate us from everything around us. But in its absence, we can be filled with the fear that something comparable exists.

Music seems to be the bridge over the gulf between form and the formless.

I felt like I was missing something. Missing you more. Missing whatever was going to happen next.

But I keep going on with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it, as I will hear yours too if I ever get the chance, if I meet you or if you escape, in the future or in heaven or in prison or underground, some other place. What they have in common is that they're not here. By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.

Can't you see? Every step I have taken, since I was that child on the bridge, has been to bring myself closer to you.

I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love.

You kill me, Rose," he said melodramatically. "Every day is agony without you. Empty. Alone. I pine for you, wondering if you're even still alive.

Oh to have you with me, to have you here, not to be alone, but to be with you, my beauty, you of all souls! You.

I miss something I never even had.