The ultimate meaning

Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 259

The end of the world in the world

"The book I'm looking for," says the blurred figure, who holds out a volume similar to yours, "is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world."

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 243

For the love of the trick

Something must always remain that eludes us... for power to have an object on which to be exercised, a space in which to stretch out its arms... As long as I know there exists in the world someone who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading's sake, I can convince myself that the world continues..."

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 240

Written truth

But if an individual truth is the only one that a book can contain, I might as well accept it and write my truth. The book of my memory? No, memory is true as long as you do not set it, as long as it is not enclosed in a form. The book of my desires? Those also are true only when their impulse acts independently of my conscious will. The only truth I can write is that of the instant I am living.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 181

Beginnings

But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest – for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both – must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 153

Reading

"Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead..."

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 72

Perfection vs disintegration

I, on the contrary, have been convinced for some time that perfection is not produced except marginally and by chance; therefore it deserves no interest at all, the true nature of things being revealed only in disintegration.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 57

Shattered time and literature

Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. We can rediscover the continuity of time only in the novels of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 8