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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.

Italo Calvino

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Italo Calvino
Age: 62 †
Born: 1923
Born: January 15
Died: 1985
Died: September 19
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Santiago de Compostela de las Vegas
Italo Giovanni Calvino Mameli
Italo Giovanni Calvino
Else
Absurd
Dream
Desires
Everything
Rules
Conceals
Even
Perspective
Deceitful
Made
Dreams
Perspectives
Something
Cities
Discourse
Like
Secret
Thread
Desire
Fears

More quotes by Italo Calvino

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Renouncing things is less difficult than people believe: it's all a matter of getting started. Once you've succeeded in dispensing with something you thought essential, you realize you can also do without something else, then without many other things.
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Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.
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The book I'm looking for,' says the blurred figure, who holds out a volume similar to yours, 'is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world.
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Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings...if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough.
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It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.
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Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
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A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
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Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.
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To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in a place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished.
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Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
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New York is perhaps the only place in America where you feel at the centre and not at the margins, in the provinces, so for that reason I prefer its horror to this privileged beauty, its enslavement to the freedoms which remain local and privileged and very particularized, and which do not represent a genuine antithesis.
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Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
Italo Calvino
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The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand
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I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.
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I am a prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume.
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What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?
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Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave. You cand resume your flight whereever you like, they say to me, but you will arive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the names of the airport changes.
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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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We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.
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...Life is nothing but trading smells.
Italo Calvino