Invisible Cities

by Italo Calvino

Desires are already memories.

The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past:

honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember:

Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.

It's not real if you can't remeber it

“You return from lands equally distant and you can tell me only the thoughts that come to a man who sits on his doorstep at evening to enjoy the cool air. What is the use, then, of all your traveling?”

branches of the past: dead branches.

The two Valdradas live for each other, their eyes interlocked; but there is no love between them.

sprout,

“Without stones there is no arch.”

The girl was identical with one in my village who had gone mad for love and killed herself.

the moment when I concentrate and reflect, I find myself again, always, in this garden, at this hour of the evening,

knight could stand for a real horseman, or for a procession of coaches, an army on the march, an equestrian monument: a queen could be a lady looking down from her balcony, a fountain, a church with a pointed dome, a quince tree.

“I speak and speak,” Marco says,

Marco was the biggest yap

reveals the form of cities that do not yet have a form