Italo Calvino Quotes

I think cynicism lasts. Sentimentality ages, dates quickly.

Time itself comes in drops.

Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not 'yours,' not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.

Beneath the stains of time the feeling disappears, you are someone else I am still right here.

We have this idea that love is supposed to last forever. But love isn't like that. It's a free-flowing energy that comes and goes when it pleases. Sometimes, it stays for life; other times it stays for a second, a day, a month or a year. So don't fear love when it comes simply because it makes you vulnerable. But don't be surprised when it leaves either. Just be glad you had the opportunity to experience it.

We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say this we think of that hour as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time; it does not occur to us that it can have any connexion with the day that has already dawned and can mean that death -- or its first assault and partial possession of us, after which it will never leave hold of us again -- may occur this very afternoon, so far from uncertain, this afternoon whose time-table, hour by hour, has been settled in advance.

The trouble is that you think you have time.

There was one element of my childhood that was really a positive asset for me. By moving a lot, I learned to assimilate into whatever new surroundings I had and to become very comfortable with people quickly. I think that was one of the strongest contributing factors to my becoming an actor, because I constantly had to readjust, even reinvent. But at the same time, it also became very easy for me not to become attached to people, places, or things. I learned to enjoy people and places for the time I had, for the moment, to be in the moment, and move on.

‎"Does all the beauty of the world stop when you die?" "No," said the Old Oak; "it will last much longer - longer than I can even think of." "Well, then," said the little May-fly, "we have the same time to live; only we reckon differently.

Already, it is later than you think for your earthly life at best, is only a blink of an eye between two eternities.

Love is transient even on a very personal level. We lose everyone that we love. Sometimes we drift apart and sometimes we die.

Time is all you have and you may find one day that you have less than you think.

We think very little of time present; we anticipate the future, as being too slow, and with a view to hasten it onward, we recall the past to stay it as too swiftly gone. We are so thoughtless, that we thus wander through the hours which are not here, regardless only of the moment that is actually our own.

While the flowers, pale and unreal in the moonlight, floated away upon the river; and thus do greater things that once were in our breasts, and near our hearts, flow from us to the eternal sea.

We are seeing, then, that our experience is altogether momentary. From one point of view, each moment is so elusive and so brief that we cannot even think about it before it has gone. From another point of view, this moment is always here, since we know no other moment than the present moment. It is always dying, always becoming past more rapidly than imagination can conceive. Yet at the same time it is always being born, always new, emerging just as rapidly from that complete unknown we call the future. Thinking about it almost makes you breathless.

Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.

It's about moments in life that are great but don't last. They don't go on, but you always have the memory and they have an effect on you. That's what I was thinking about.

Look. We both know life is short, Macy. Too short to waste a single second with anyone who doesn't appreciate and value you." You said the other day life was long," I shot back. "Which is it?" It's both," she said, shrugging. "It all depends on how you choose to live it. It's like forever, always changing." Nothing can be two opposite things at once," I said. "It's impossible." No," she replied, squeezing my hand, "what's impossible is that we actually think it could be anything OTHER than that.

human relationships simply aren't durable. I think back to the women in my life. they seem non-existent.

You know when you're a kid and you think, 'Oh no, I've got double math, this is never gonna end,' but then it ends, and it's like it never happened? That's like life.

This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong, to love that well which thou must leave ere long

I think illusion is one of the most interesting things that I've found to think about. Just look at yesterday, and what you were doing, and how important it was, and how nonexistent it is now! How dreamlike it is! Same thing with tomorrow. So where are we living?

So here I am walking around with another person inside of me. Though I think I put it better the day we parted when I said there is a third person we have created from the two of us. And I am stalked now by that other entity.

Yesterday you were thinking about today because then it was tomorrow; now it is today and you are thinking about tomorrow, and when the tomorrow comes, it will become today- because anything that exists, exists here and now, it cannot exist otherwise.