Angela > Angela's Quotes

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“...the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping...something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draw arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment, and other characters come on to the scene... ”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them, while on the other hand to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.”
― Galileo Galilei

“The only true non-conformists are in the asylums; the only radically free spirits are in the death house awaiting the chair. We live by patterns.”
― Herman Wouk, This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism

“We who live here wear this corner of the city like a comfortable old coat, an extension of our personalities, threadbare yet retaining a beauty of its own.”
― Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women

“We will never solve the problems of cities unless we like the urban-ness of urban life. Cities aren't villages; they aren't machines; they aren't works of art; and they aren't telecommunications stations. They are spaces for face to face contact of amazing variety and richness. They are spectacle - and what is wrong with that?”
― Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women

“Perhaps we should be happier in our cities were we to respond to them as to nature or dreams: as objects of exploration, investigation and interpretation, settings for voyages of discovery.”
― Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women

“The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“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.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler