"Invisible Cities" 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 the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did now know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

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.

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 gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

The city does not say its past, it contains it like the lines of a hand.

Should I go on? Or go back? What am I to say of him, what is there to say of him? That he is obstinate, that he talks too much, that he is incapable of keeping his own secrets, much less others'?

It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.

The city appears to man as a map in relief, as a diagram of his desires.

Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.

But Venice is merely a drawing. The city itself is imaginary.