Love Quote by Italo Calvino

Calvino’s line lands like a raised eyebrow at romance’s usual self-mythology. By yoking love to gluttony, he refuses the flattering story we tell ourselves: that desire is spiritual, elevated, exempt from appetite. Instead, he drags it back to the body and its compulsions - then performs a neat reversal. The punch isn’t that love resembles overeating; it’s that both can be ruined by vagueness.

“Pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision” reads almost like engineering advice. Calvino suggests that satisfaction isn’t produced by intensity alone, but by calibration: timing, dosage, attention, and restraint. Too much becomes numbness; too little becomes longing. Precision implies limits, and limits imply ethics. The subtext is quietly corrective: if love is an appetite, it needs discernment, not surrender. This is less anti-romantic than anti-sloppy. He’s skeptical of grand gestures that substitute volume for accuracy.

Context matters. Calvino writes out of a mid-century European sensibility wary of both consumer excess and sentimental cliché, and his journalistic eye favors exactness over gush. The line also echoes his broader literary project: making the lightness of pleasure depend on structure, not spontaneity. It’s a modernist romance tip disguised as a moral observation: you don’t “fall” into lasting delight; you practice it. Gluttony is what happens when you confuse more with better. Love can fail the same way - by being imprecise about what, and who, you actually want.