Italo Calvino Quotes

We stand on the threshold of a twilight-whether morning or evening we do not know. One is followed by the night, the other heralds the dawn.

When is the night over? Is it the start of sunrise or the end of it? Is it when you finally go to sleep or simply when you realize that you have to?

At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.

WAKING AT NIGHT The blue river is grey at morning and evening. There is twilight at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark wondering if this quiet in me now is a beginning or an end.

Reality is a sliding door.

It was the in-between time, before day leaves and night comes, a time I’ve never been partial to because of the sadness that lingers in the space between going and coming.

What breaks in daybreak? Is it the night? Is it the sun, cracked in two by the horizon like an egg, spilling out light?

Out of the corner of one eye, I could see my mother. Out of the corner of the other eye, I could see her shadow on the wall, cast there by the lamplight. It was a big and solid shadow, and it looked so much like my mother that I became frightened. For I could not be sure whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world.

Computer mediation seems to bathe action in a more conditional light: perhaps it happened; perhaps it didn't. Without the layeredrichness of direct sensory engagement, the symbolic medium seems thin, flat, and fragile.

At two o'clock in the morning, if you open your window and listen, You will hear the feet of the Wind that is going to call the sun. And the trees in the Shadow rustle and the trees in the moonlight glisten, And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done.

The brilliance of morning is in sharp contrast with the darkness of night" - Woman thou art loosed

I’ve always felt that night doesn’t fall. Night rises.

When you get up, the night and day is a contradiction. But you get up at 4 a.m. — that first blush of blue is where the night and day are trying to find harmony with each other.

If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.

Who can really distinguish between the sea and what's reflected in it? Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness?

We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.

There is, I have heard, a little thing called sunrise, in which the sun reverses the process we all viewed the night before. You might assume such a thing as mythical as those beasts that guard the corners of the earth, but I have it on the finest authority, and have, indeed, from time to time, regarded it with my own eyes.

It's hard to tell / if we close our eyes or if night / opens in us other starred eyes, / if it burrows into the wall of our dream / till some other door opens. / But the dream is only the flitting costume of one moment, / is spent in one beat / of the darkness, / and falls at our feet, cast off / as the day stirs and sails away with us.

In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect wood-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.

Day! Faster and more fast. O'er night's brim, day boils at last.

For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.

The line between outside and inside is fuzzier in fantasy. Maybe that's something people are looking for.