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"Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me."
Polo answers: "Without stones there is no arch."

— Italo Calvino Invisible Cities (1972)

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More quotes by Italo Calvino

Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979)

Gore is a man without an unconscious.

«What makes love making and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space»

A quarter of America is a dramatic, tense, violent country, exploding with contradictions, full of brutal, physiological vitality, and that is the America that I have really loved and love. But a good half of it is a country of boredom, emptiness, monotony, brainless production, and brainless consumption, and this is the American inferno.

As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. (di quest'onda che rifluisce dai ricordi la città s'imbeve coma una spugna e si dilata). The city, however, does not tell of its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand...

Invisible Cities (1972)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Italo Calvino (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.