[Brzask] jest to pora, kiedy przedmioty tracą konsystencję cienia, jaką darzyła je noc, i odzyskują po trochu właściwe sobie barwy; ale najpierw przechodzą jeszcze przez coś niby strefę pośrednią, niejasną, zaledwie muśnięte czy raczej otoczone...

There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read...

The seventh reader interrupts you: “Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could only end in two ways: having passed all the tests, the...

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. …Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!…...

what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller’s past...

É clássico aquilo que persiste como rumor mesmo onde predomina a atualidade mais incompatível.

If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most...

Her breast was young, the nipples rosy. Cosimo just grazed it with his lips, before Viola slid away over the branches as if she were flying, with him clambering after her, and that skirt of...

When you’re young, all evolution lies before you, every road is open to you, and at the same time you can enjoy the fact of being there on the rock, flat mollusk-pulp, damp and happy.

With the smell of beer I try to get the smell of death off me. And only the smell of death will get the smell of beer off you, like all the drinkers whose graves...

It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on...

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 the tests, the hero and the heroine married,...

battery” one, in the conditions of artificiality in which it lives, with artificial light and chemical feed.

Something must always remain that eludes us … For power to have an object on which it can be exercised, a space in which to stretch out its arms … As long as I know...

Journeys to relive your past?’ was the Khan’s question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: ‘Journeys to recover your future?’And Marco’s answer was: ‘Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller...

A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.

Sections in the bookstore- Books You Haven’t Read- Books You Needn’t Read- Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading- Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read...

You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in...

Karta książki tylko wtedy jest coś warta, jeśli możesz ją odwrócić i dojrzeć za nią życie, które na nią napiera gwałtem i miesza wszystkie karty.

…And meanwhile the Galaxy ran through space and left behind those signs old and new and I still hadn’t found mine.

…the world was trying to change its old face and show its underbelly of earth and roots.

,Qué importa el nombre del autor en la portada? Trasladémonos con el pensamiento a tres mil años de aquí. Quién sabe qué libros se habrán salvado de nuestra época, y de quién sabe qué autores...

Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.

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...

[…] mi sembra che il linguaggio venga sempre usato in modo approssimativo, casuale, sbadato, e ne provo un fastidio intollerabile.

1 )Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.2)A classic is a work which constantly generates...

Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.

That wish to enter into an elusive element which had urged Cosimo into the trees, was still working now inside him unsatisfied, making him long for a more intimate link, a relationship which would bind...

Si una noche de invierno un viajero, fuera del poblado de Malbork, asomándose desde la abrupta costa sin temor al viento y al vértigo, mira hacia abajo donde la sombra se adensa en una red...

As far as you are able to gather from hints scattered through these letters, Apocryphal Power, riven by internecine battles and eluding the control of its founder, Ermes Marana, has broken into two groups: a...

To fall asleep like a bird. To have a wing you could stick your head under, aworld of branches suspended above the earthly world, barely glimpsed downbelow, muffled and remote. Once you begin rejection your...

This is the paradox of the power of literature: it seems that only when it is persecuted does it show its true powers, challenging authority, whereas in our permissive society it feels that it is...

Who are we, who is each one of us if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things we have imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects,...

Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.

I like to know that book exists that I will still be able to read…” she says, sure that existent objects, concrete albeit unknown, must correspond to the strength of her desire. How can you...

As Raimbaut dragged a dead man along he thought, ‘Ohcorpse, I have come rushing here only to be dragged along by theheels like you. What is this frenzy that drives me, this mania forbattle and...

It’s better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.

We’ll make an army in the trees and bring the earth and the people on it to their senses.

the cemetery is the home of those who are not here, come in.

The difference between the true and the false is only a prejudice of ours.

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather:that man is called ‘I’ and you know nothing else about him, just as this station is called only...

again I am torn between the necessity and the impossibility of answering.

Reading is solitude.

I was living and dying in all the fibers of what is chewed and digested and in all the fibers that absorb the sun, consuming and digesting. Under the thatched arbor of a restaurant on...

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

what matters is not the enclosure of the work within a harmonious figure, but the centrifugal force produced by it — a plurality of language as a guarantee of a truth that is not merely...

The city of Leonia refashions itself every day: every morning the people wake between fresh sheets, wash with just-unwrapped cakes of soap, wear brand-new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened tins, listening...

The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books...