550 Quotes by Italo Calvino

Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.

With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

There is still one of which you never speak.'Marco Polo bowed his head.'Venice,' the Khan said.Marco smiled. 'What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?'The emperor did not turn a hair. 'And yet I have never heard you mention that name.'And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.

Pensé: —Uno llega a un momento de la vida en que de la gente que ha conocido son mas los muertos que los vivos. Y la mente se niega a aceptar otrasfisonomías, otras expresiones: en todas las caras nuevas que encuentra, imprime los viejos calcos, para cada una encuentra la máscara que más se adapta.

...Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

Long-time inhabitant of steeples, accustomed to contemplating, from his perch on a rainspout, the expanse of roofs, he knew that the souls of cities are more substantial and more lasting than those of all their inhabitants put together.

No one, wise Kublai, knows better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it.

If the spark doesn't come, that's a pity; but we do not read the classics out of duty or respect, but only out of love.

I have finally come around to asking myself what is expressed in that sand of written words which I have strung together throughout my life, that sand that seems to me to be so far away from the beaches and desert of living. Perhaps by staring at the sand as sand, words as words, we can come close to understanding how and to what extent the world that has been ground down and eroded can still find in sand a foundation and model.