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 hero and 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." You stop for a moment to reflect on these words. Then, in a flash, you decide you want to marry Ludmilla. Italo Calvino
Some Similar Quotes
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  2. Tell the story as if it were only of interest to the small circle of your characters, of which you may be one. There is no other way to put life into the story. - Horacio Quiroga
  3. But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world. - Umberto Eco
  4. I always tell my writing students that every good piece of writing begins with both a mystery and a love story. And that every single sentence must be a poem. And that economy is the key to all good writing. And that every character has... - Silas House
  5. I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself. - Anonymous
More Quotes By Italo Calvino
  1. 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 is that within both of them times and spaces open,...
  2. 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 Before Being Written- Books That If You Had More Than...
  3. 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 a river-bank, where Olivia had waited for me, our teeth...
  4. 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 partial.
  5. 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.
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