Quotes About History

The espresso machines in station cafés boast their kinship with the locomotives, the espresso machines of yesterday and today with the locomotives and steam engines of today and yesterday.

In museums I always enjoy stopping at the Saint Jeromes.

Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead.

La ciudad no cuenta su pasado, lo contiene como las líneas de una mano, escrito en las esquinas de las calles, en las rejas de las ventanas

Los futuros no realizados son sólo ramas del pasado: ramas secas.

To be able to read the classics you have to know "from where" you are reading them; otherwise both the book and the reader will be lost in a timeless cloud.

Pero la ciudad no cuenta su pasado, lo contiene como las líneas de una mano, escrito en las esquinas de las calles, en las rejas de las ventanas, en los pasamanos de las escaleras, en las antenas de los pararrayos, en las astas de las banderas, cada segmento surcado a su vez por arañazos, muescas, incisiones, comas. Italo Calvino. Las ciudades invisibles (Zaira)

Here in Turin you can write because past and future have greater prominence than the present, the force of past history and the anticipation of the future give a concreteness and sense to the discrete, ordered images of today. Turin is a city which entices the reader towards vigour, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way toward madness.

Let us move forward in thought to three thousand years from now. Who knows which books from our period will be saved, and who knows which authors' names will be remembered. Some books will remain famous but will be considered anonymous works, as for us the epic of Gilgamesh; others author's names will still be known, but none of their works will survive, as was the case with Socrates; or perhaps, all the surviving books will be attributed to a single, mysterious author, like Homer.

Al llegar a cada nueva ciudad el viajero encuentra un pasado suyo que ya no sabía que tenía: la extrañeza de lo que no eres o no posees más te espera al paso en los lugares extraños y no poseídos.

The historical events which mothers take part in acquire the greatness and invincibility of natural phenomena.

É clássico aquilo que persiste como rumor mesmo onde predomina a atualidade mais incompatível.

The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.

Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves.

Insomma, c'erano anche da noi tutte le cause della Rivoluzione francese. Solo che non eravamo in Francia, e la Rivoluzione non ci fu. Viviamo in un Paese dove si verificano sempre le cause e non gli effetti.

Las ciudades son un conjunto de muchas cosas: memorias, deseos, signos de un lenguaje; son lugares de trueque, como explican todos los libros de historia de la economía, pero estos trueques no lo son sólo de mercancías, son también trueques de palabras, de deseos, de recuerdos.

The folktale must be re-created each time. At the core of the narrative is the storyteller, a prominent figure in every village or hamlet, who has his or her own style and appeal. And it is through this individual that the timeless folktale is linked with the world of its listeners and with history.

Forse non farò cose importanti, ma la storia è fatta di piccoli gesti anonimi, forse domani morirò, magari prima di quel tedesco, ma tutte le cose che farò prima di morire e la mia morte stessa saranno pezzetti di storia, e tutti i pensieri che sto facendo adesso influiscono sulla mia storia di domani, sulla storia di domani del genere umano.

In the course of millions of years there was no form of living creature that hadn't had its opportunity to come forth, populate the Earth, and then—in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred—decline and vanish.

I sogni dei partigiani sono rari e corti, sogni nati dalle notti di fame, legati alla storia del cibo sempre poco e da dividere in tanti: sogni di pezzi di pane morsicati e poi chiusi in un cassetto

Amid all the extraordinary events you were witness to in your lifetime, the most extraordinary was that everything went on, not that everything was collapsing?

Some books will remain famous but will be considered anonymous works, as for us the epic of Gilgamesh; others author's names will still be known, but none of their works will survive, as was the case with Socrates; or perhaps, all the surviving books will be attributed to a single, mysterious author, like Homer.

Forse non farò cose importanti, ma la storia è fatta di piccoli gesti anonimi, forse domani morirò, [...] ma tutte le cose che farò prima di morire e la mia morte stessa saranno pezzetti di storia, e tutti i pensieri che sto facendo adesso influiscono sulla mia storia di domani, sulla storia di domani del genere umano.

EVEN WHEN IT STANDS VACANT THE PAST IS NEVER EMPTY.