Italo Calvino Quotes

Say your name over two hundred times and discover you are no one.

It's kind of like when you look at yourself in the mirror and you say your name. And it gets to a point where none of it seems real.

Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world?

Almost nobody travels willingly from sameness to sameness and repetition to repetition, even if the physical effort required is trivial.

I travel, always arriving in the same place.

So we tell the same story, over and over. Just the details are different

But what matter whether I was born or not, have lived or not, am dead or merely dying. I shall go on doing as I have always done, not knowing what it is I do, nor who I am, nor where I am, nor if I am.

When I notice that all the beats sound exactly the same, it starts to wear on me.

There was much conversation, most of which sounded like the rest of it.

What can be seductive about the eternal nothing is that the finest day is indifferently this one or any other like it.

I've been on the planet for 40 years now, and I'm still none the wiser as to what it's all about really. I've never worried about life's big questions. People at my age sit about pondering, 'Why are we here?' The only time I ever asked myself that is when Suzanne booked us a surprise holiday to Lanzarote.

It's so horrible to realize you're just the same as everyone else, isn't it?

We want you, not your money. As long as you're at fight club, you're not how much money you've got in the bank. You're not your job. You're not your family, and you're not who you tell yourself. You're not your name. You're not your problems. You're not your age. You are not your hopes. You will not be saved. We are all going to die, someday.

I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man, myself alone. From out of a whirlwind the voice of God replied: I am not, either. I dreamed the world the way you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare: one of the forms of my dream was you, who, like me, are many and one.

I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects.

The real issue is not whether two and two make four or whether two and two make five, but whether life advances by men who love words or by men who love living.

Why dispute what we shall be, when we know not even what we are.

one day in the country is exactly like another.

Sir, when you have seen one green field, you have seen all green fields. Let us walk down Cheapside.

My life is very monotonous," the fox said. "I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored.

I'm not a sociologist, and the novel has often concerned itself with sociology. It's one of the generating forces that's made fiction interesting to people. But that's not my concern. I'm interested in psychology. And also certain philosophical questions about the world.

The only truth is that I live. Sincerely, I live. Who am I? Well, that's a bit much.

Who am I? is the only question worth asking and the only one never answered.

What is there? I know first of all that I am. But who am I? All I know of myself is that I suffer. And if I suffer it is because at the origin of myself there is mutilation, separation. I am separated. What I am separated from -- I cannot name it. But I am separated.

I know not whence I came, nor whither I go, nor who I am.