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Italo Calvino

15 October 1923-19 September 1985

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Abortion is an act whereby the person who is massacred, physically and morally, is the woman.

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The Cat 1s 2ity exists one inside the other with the city of men, but they are not the same city.

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A City is like a dream, made of desires and fears, even if the thread of those desire's discourse is secret, even if their rules are absurd, if their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

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The City is like a dream. It is made of desire and secret, its rules are absurd, its secret, its rules are absurd, its perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

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The City 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.

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The City will continue to be born in new forms until every shape in the catalogue of forms has found its city. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

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The City is a place where you take delight not in its seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.

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The City is a phenomenon of men that exists one inside the other with the city of cats, but they are not the same city.

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The City is a place where the traveler finds 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, unpossessed places.

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A Classic is a book which, with each rereading, offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.

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A Classic is any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.

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Fantasy is like jam. You have to spread it on a solid slice of bread. Otherwise it remains a shapeless thing out of which one can't make anything.

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Flight 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.

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The Ghost is most at home in the home of interesting people. The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.

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Hell is not something that will be. If it exist, it is what is already here, 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 it 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 hell, is not hell, then make those things endure, give them space. S.