“It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.”

“Desires are already memories.”

A city consists “of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its 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 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.”

“Your labor which gives form to desire takes from desire its form.”

“If a building has no signboard or figure, its very form and the position it occupies in the city’s order suffice to indicate its function.”

“The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind. Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.”

“Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms.”

“The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.”

“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.”

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

“This—some say—confirms the hypothesis that each man bears in his mind a city made only of differences, a city without figures and without form, and the individual cities fill it up.”

We must “divide cities into these two species: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it.”

The City of Euphemia where they trade not goods, but memories.

“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.”

“If men and women began to live their ephemeral dreams, every phantom would become a person with whom to begin a story of pursuits, pretenses, misunderstandings, clashes, oppressions, and the carousel of fantasies would stop.”

Some cities know “only departures, not returns.”

Cities are “spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.”

“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.”

“I speak and speak, but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.”

“Perinthia’s astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong and their figures are unable to describe the heavens, or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters.”

“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.”