Italo Calvino Quotes About Past

• what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller 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, unpossessed places.

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  Italo Calvino

  1834

• The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand

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  Italo Calvino

  Cities  

  Italo Calvino (2013). “Invisible Cities”, p.19, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  3743

• Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.

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  Italo Calvino

  3173

• Memory really matters...only if it binds together the imprint of the past and the project of the future, if it enables us to act without forgetting what we wanted to do, to become without ceasing to be, and to be without ceasing to become.

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  Italo Calvino

  1473

• 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, unpossessed places.

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  Italo Calvino

  2427

• 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.

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  Italo Calvino

  Cities  

  Italo Calvino (2013). “Invisible Cities”, p.19, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  1469

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