“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 , book Invisible Cities

Page 44.
Source: Invisible Cities (1972)
Context: 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.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 4, 2022. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are ab…" by Italo Calvino?

Italo Calvino 44

Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels 1923–1985

Rachel Hawthorne (1950) American author

Source: Full Moon

“There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected.”

Dennis Lehane book Mystic River

Source: Mystic River

“Viewed from an evolutionary perspective, mind is not the cause of the order in nature; mind is an example of the order in nature - something to be explained rather than the explanation for everything else.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 101

“Often secret desires as well as abilities surface in our dreams.”

P. C. Cast book Hunted

Source: Hunted

“Absurd, irreducible; nothing — not even a profound and secret delirium of nature — could explain it.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea

Reflections on a chestnut tree root.
Nausea (1938)
Context: Absurd, irreducible; nothing — not even a profound and secret delirium of nature — could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it.

“Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.”

Henry Ford book My Life and Work

My Life and Work (1922)

“The funny thing about facing imminent death is that it really snaps everything else into perspective.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: The Angel Experiment

“Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said… was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret?”

Willa Cather book A Lost Lady

A Lost Lady (1923), Part I, Ch. 7

“Champions aren't made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them-a desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have the skill, and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill.”

Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

“Everything, alas, is an abyss, — actions, desires, dreams,
Words!”

Charles Baudelaire Le Gouffre

Hélas! tout est abîme, — action, désir, rêve,
Parole!
"Le Gouffre" [The Abyss], Nouvelles Fleurs du Mal (1862) http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Gouffre

“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.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Italo Calvino 44

Related quotes

Related topics