The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow.

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You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.

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The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.

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Life, thought the naked man, was a hell, with rare moments recalling some ancient paradise.

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Reading is solitude. One reads alone, even in another's presence.

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What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.

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I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.

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What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?

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The novels that attract me most... are those that create an illusion of transperancy around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel and perverse as possible.

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I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses.

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