Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.
Don't ask where the rest of this book is! It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. All books continue in the beyond...
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.
Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossess...
Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?
You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.
You have with you the book you were reading in the cafe, which you are eager to continue, so that you can then hand it on to her, to communicate again with her through the channel dug by others' words...
Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. There is the blueprint, they say.
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 p...
This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life b...
One reads alone, even in another's presence.
For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is anothe...
A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the g...
You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints...
The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.
Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order and rhythm; or else someone's gaze, answer, gesture is enough; it is enough for someone to do somethi...
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
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...
I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.