Italo Calvino Quotes

Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

I've been on the road for four years. I won't recognise the place again, until I walk out on stage.

The road was new to me, as roads always are, going back.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves.

Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.

Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don't (...) Imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two of them together? That's me and my memories.

The summer ends and we wonder who we are And there you go, my friends, with your boxes in your car And today I passed the high school, the river, the maple tree I passed the farms that made it Through the last days of the century And I knew that I was going to learn again Again, in this less hazy light I saw the fields beyond the fields The fields beyond the field

I was heading off to my new world. But I was taking a part of my past, and the future, along with me for the ride.

All confessions are Odysseys.

I look back at old photographs and videotapes, and I go, Who was I trying to be? Who was I doing this for?

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

That's a part of me going back to what I used to do.

The only thing simple about the past is that it's not now.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

I realized I've spent all my life creating a past.

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

Six months later I was in Paris. I was 16, and it all started to happen.

We all know how we can be turned around by a magic place; that's why we travel, often. And yet we all know, too, that the change cannot be guaranteed. Travel is a fool's paradise, Emerson reminded us, if we think that we can find anything far off that we could not find at home.

No graduation speaker will ever tell you that the future is anything but uncertain. It never is. But graduations need not only be obsessed with looking ahead; a graduation can be a day on which we turn back and trace our steps to see how we ended up where we are.

Well, you know, it's really been, you know, quite a trip for me.

I have been a multitude of shapes, Before I assumed a consistent form.

Life is a journey and it's about growing and changing and coming to terms with who and what you are and loving who and what you are.

Let a man turn to his own childhood - no further - if he will renew his sense of remoteness, and of the mystery of change.