Bookmarker is a personal project by @dellsystem to help with retaining reading material. Source on GitHub.

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2 years, 8 months ago

the terms anarchism and Communism

4) In defining my youthful ideas I used the terms anarchism and Communism. The first stands for the need for the truth about life to be developed in all its richness, over and above the deadening effect imposed on it by institutions. The second represents the need for the world’s richness not to be…

—p.143 Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings Political Autobiography of a Young Man (130) by Italo Calvino
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2 years, 8 months ago

I intended to live immune from every contagion

So we grew up jealously guarding a cult of individuality which we thought was exclusive to ourselves, despising the youth of the big cities whom we considered a spineless lot; we were ‘hard guys’ from the provinces, hunters, snooker-players, show-offs, proud of our lack of intellectual sophisticati…

—p.138 Political Autobiography of a Young Man (130) by Italo Calvino
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2 years, 8 months ago

discomfort in order to stay faithful to an idea

I have insisted on setting down these memories because I see that now many non-believing friends let their children have a religious education ‘so as not to give them complexes’, ‘so that they don’t feel different from the others’. I believe that this behaviour displays a lack of courage which is t…

—p.134 Political Autobiography of a Young Man (130) by Italo Calvino
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2 years, 8 months ago

one has to look for other values in life

As a child listening to the adults’ discussions in our house, I always felt that it was taken for granted that in Italy everything was going wrong. And during adolescence I and my companions at school were almost all hostile to Fascism. But it is not at all inevitable that just because of this my r…

—p.131 Political Autobiography of a Young Man (130) by Italo Calvino
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2 years, 8 months ago

men always count more than ideas

Men always count more than ideas. For me ideas have always had eyes, nose, mouth, arms and legs. Political history for me is above all a history of human presences. Just when you least expect, you realize that Italy is full of wonderful people.

—p.128 American Diary 1959–1960 (16) by Italo Calvino