The novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible.
Italo CalvinoRead
Whether there is such a thing as Reality, of which the various levels are only partial aspects, or whether there are only levels, is something that literature cannot decide. Literature recognizes rather the *reality of the levels.*
Interpretation
What this quote means
Literature reflects different aspects of reality without defining what reality truly is.
In this quote, Italo Calvino suggests that literature has the unique ability to explore and represent various levels of reality, but it cannot provide a definitive understanding of what reality itself is. Instead of presenting a single truth, literature acknowledges the multiplicity of perspectives, each revealing only a fraction of the broader, undefined reality.
Themes
RealityLiteratureLevelsTruthPerspective
In practice
Example use cases
In a book club discussion about the nature of reality in literature.
More from Italo Calvino
All quotes →Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap; the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then or never again.
Italo CalvinoRead
...and every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady's perfume in his jailbird's suit. And I'm left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells.
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Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
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The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
Italo CalvinoRead
Fantasy is like jam. . . . You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing . . . out of which you can’t make anything.
Italo CalvinoRead
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