Lucrecia

“You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don't say a great deal. So much the better, there is no message that indiscreetly outshouts the message that the book itself must communicate directly, that you must extract from the book, however much or little it may be. Of course, this circling of the book, too, this reading around it before reading inside it, is a part of the pleasure in a new book, but like all preliminary pleasures, it has its optimal duration if you want it to serve as a thrust toward the more substantial pleasure of the consummation of the act, namely the reading of the book.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“... we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“True love cannot be found where it does not exist, nor can it be denied where it does”
― Torquato Tasso

“Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler