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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.

— 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.

"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."

Invisible Cities (1972)

«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.

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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.