“Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.”

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“The traveler’s past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, but the more remote past.”

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“You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”

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“It is not so much [the murderers’] copulating or murdering that matters as the copulating or murdering of the images, limpid and cold in the mirror.”

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“If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.”

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“The bridge is not supported by one stone or another, but by the line of the arch that they form. Without stones there is no arch.”

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“Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice. Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased. Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or, perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”

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“You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living.”