Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
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Obscure or obvious as it might be, everything Marco displayed had the power of emblems, which, once seen, cannot be forgotten or confused. [...] Each piece of information about a place recalled to the emperor’s mind that first gesture or object with which Marco had designated the place. The new fact received a meaning from that emblem and also added to the emblem a new meaning. Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms.
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Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
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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.
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Calvino is a magician of language.